5G brings new opportunities for optical fiber, optical module, WDM optical device

At the "2019 China Optical Network Symposium and China FTTH Forum" on June 12th, the executive deputy director of the Communications Technology Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the director of the China Telecommunications Group Corporation's CST, and the chairman of the China Optical Network Symposium Conference, Weileping, delivered a theme titled "The Trends and Opportunities of Optical Communications in the 5G Age". Speech. In his speech, he mentioned that the current global development of 5G has entered a critical period for commercial use, which will bring new opportunities for optical fiber, optical modules, and WDM optical devices. In addition, Weileping pointed out that the all-optical network is the ideal load-bearing technology for 5G.
China's 5G construction will enter the substantive stage
5G has entered the commercial critical period. For the 5G standard, 3GPP has completed the full version of 5G(R16), mainly for enhanced mobile broadband(eMBB) and high reliable low time delay(uRLLC), as of May 2019 low, There are already 12 operators in South Korea, the United States, Finland, the United Kingdom and other countries that have begun commercial use, of which South Korea's Hongstations will reach 80,000 at the end of the year. The NSA model of the non-independent network and the opening of eMBB applications are used. However, the network is unstable, and the power consumption and price of base stations and mobile phones are high. It is expected that the world will enter the 5G commercial stage in 2020.
With the official issuance of 4 5G commercial licenses by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China's 5G construction will enter the substantive stage. In 2019, more than 40 cities will be built to build a total of 8-10 million 5G macro stations. In 2020, commercial scale will have 600,000 to 800,000 macro stations in hundreds of cities; From 2021 to 2027, there will be millions of magnitude macro stations and 10 million level small base stations deployed.
5G brings new opportunities to optical fiber, optical module, WDM optical device
For the opportunity of the 5G era, Weileping said that 5G's demand for optical fiber is very large. According to the uplink edge rate of 3Mbps, 3.5 GHz uplink is 9dB worse than 1.8 GHz. According to the 3.5 G independent network, the required outdoor macro station is at least 2 times that of 4G. If the indoor coverage is based on a small base station, tens of millions of units are required. It can be seen that 5G still needs a large number of fiber optic connections to various base stations, at least a few hundred million core kilometers.
In addition, Weileping pointed out that after the millimetre wave is started, the number of base stations will increase significantly. The 5G network cloud needs to build a lot of DC, but also bring optical fiber and module requirements.
"The new optical fiber will be the focus, especially the ultra-low loss G. 654E fiber, 4dB gain. Indoor stations and data centers bring bending resistance and a new generation of multimode fiber requirements. "Weileping further stated.
As for the 5G era light module, the high-speed light module will usher in great opportunities. Weileping expects that the 5G will bring tens of millions of magnitude 25G/40G/100G light modules, and the data center will also bring more space for the light module to develop. Based on PAM4 modulation is the current high speed optical module mainstream technology scheme.
Further consider the huge development space of the current upside down phenomenon of our data center(currently the United States accounts for 45 IDC number, our broadband users are three times the United States, but our IDC number accounts for only 8 ), the development space of high-speed optical modules is even more impressive.
The WDM device opportunity in the 5G era, the multi-antenna technology has a huge driving force on the system bandwidth, the marginalization of the Metropolitan network WDM/OTN and the need for 5G load, which drives the development of WDM devices. Adjustable lasers and WDM devices(mainly AWGs) will be the main challenge for cost effectiveness.
The 5G network requires a strong load-bearing architecture. Weileping believes that the all-optical network is the most ideal load-bearing technology for 5G, with huge available spectrum(10 THz), oversized capacity(100 Tbps), ultra-high rate(1 Tbps) and other advantages.
At the same time, Weileping pointed out that the first step in the evolution of the all-optical network is the fiberization of the transmission link. At present, the transmission has achieved fiber optic deployment and is evolving to 200-400 Gbps. The second step is to access the fiber optic network, requiring fiber optic connections between the distribution segment and the introduction line and even the desktop, and the light into the copper retreat is still Luchang. The third step is to introduce optical exchange technology at the transmission node. The CTC backbone network will fully deploy RODAM before the end of the year, and the backbone of the trip will continue to extend to the large and small metropolitan area networks and even access networks.