On the morning of June 12, the 2019 China Optical Webinar (OPTiNET 2019) officially opened in Beijing, focusing on research and discussion on hot topics such as data center interconnection, next-generation optical transmission network, broadband access and 5G. Wei Leping, executive deputy director of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, director of the China Telecom Science and Technology Committee, and chairman of the China Optical Network Conference, published the industry report on the Trends and Opportunities of Optical Communications in the 5G Era. From the trend of network traffic, the development trend of optical transmission links and optical nodes is described. Then, the focus is on the characteristics of the 5G prequel and the requirements for optical devices. Finally, the opportunities presented by the 5G era for small base stations, optical fibers, optical modules, WDM devices, and silicon optical devices are described.

Wei Leping introduced the trend of the maximum link capacity of China’s transmission network. He said that the maximum link capacity of the actual transmission network will increase by 42% every year in 2008-2018, and the growth rate in 2018-2022 will still reach 15%, of which the maximum capacity in 2019 can be  Breaking through 100Tb/s, the maximum capacity in 2022 will exceed 150Tb/s.

Global 5G development has entered the critical period of commercialization. In terms of 5G standards, 3GPP has completed the full version of 5G (R16), mainly for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and high reliability low latency (uRLLC). As of May 2019, there is already  Twelve operators in South Korea, the United States, Finland, the United Kingdom and other countries have started commercial use, and the number of Korean macro stations will reach 80,000.  It is expected that the world will enter the 5G commercial phase in 2020. With the official release of the 5G mountain work licenses by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, China’s 5G construction will enter a substantive phase. In 2019, more than 40 cities will be built, and a total of 80,000 to 100,000 5G macro stations will be built. In 2020, there will be hundreds of cities for commercial scale. Construction of 600,000-800,000 macro stations; 2021-2027 will be deployed in millions of macro stations and 10 million small base stations.

5G prequel is the largest part of construction. For its low cost requirements, Wei Leping believes that the first architecture needs to be reconfigured, driven by interface openness, hardware lily, and software open source. The interface needs to use the eCPRI interface, and the rate is reduced by 4 times, from 100G to 25G. The cost of optical devices is a bottleneck, which is small in scale, harsh in temperature, long in transmission distance, and slow in technological innovation. The idea of reducing the cost of optical devices, Wei Leping believes that to achieve technological innovation and product grading, different technologies use different technologies to achieve the lowest cost, such as silicon photonics technology, mass production scale to reduce options, promote localization and technology sharing in different areas. Optical devices are separately purchased to increase the number and reduce overhead.

5G’s demand for the number of optical fibers, Wei Leping believes that due to the rapid increase in the number of small base stations, a large number of optical fibers are connected to various base stations, and the demand for optical fibers in the 5G era will reach hundreds of millions of core kilometers. New fiber will be the focus, especially for ultra low loss G.654E fiber, 4dB gain.  Indoor stations and data centers bring resistance to bending and new generation multimode fiber.

In the 5G era optical module, high-speed optical modules will usher in huge opportunities. Wei Leping expects 5G to bring tens of millions of 25G/40G/100G optical modules, and the data center will bring more room for development of optical modules. Based on PAM4 modulation, it is currently the mainstream technical solution for high-speed optical modules.

The opportunity of WDM devices in the 5G era, multi-antenna technology has a huge driving force on system bandwidth, the marginalization trend of WDM/OTN for metropolitan area networks and 5G bearer needs, which drives the development of WDM devices, while tunable lasers and WDM devices (mainly being an AWG device) will be a major challenge for price/performance.

The 5G network needs a strong bearer architecture. Wei Leping believes that the all-optical network is the ideal carrier technology for 5G, and has the advantages of huge available spectrum (10THz), large capacity (100Tbps), and ultra-high rate (1Tbps). The first step in the evolution of the all-optical network is the fiberization of the transmission link. The current transmission has already achieved fiber deployment and is evolving towards 200-400 Gbps. The second step is to access the fiber opticization of the access network, requiring the fiber section to be connected to the wiring section, the lead-in line, and even the desktop. The third step is to introduce optical switching technology to the transmitting node. The CTC backbone network will fully deploy RODAM before the end of the year, and the backbone backbone all-optical network will continue to extend to the large-scale metropolitan area network and even the access network.

China’s first backbone RODAM operates for one year, saving 30-50%, energy and space savings of 50%, business configuration efficiency is greatly improved, delay is the lowest, and the wavelength is directly jumped. Wei Leping pointed out that the provincial trunk line and the provincial trunk line will use ROADM on a large scale, and the large metropolitan area network will be launched on demand. The metropolitan area and the access network need to further reduce the WSS cost.

In 2019, there will be 466 backbone ROADM nodes in China. The maximum node capacity of the CTC backbone network can reach 370Tbps. 32-dimensional WSS (up to 300Tbps) is required. The ROADM-based all-optical network will evolve to the OXC-based all-optical network. In this process, Wei Leping believes that the all-optical network will eventually need to go to SDN control.