China Unicom's all-optical base creates the strongest basic network in the era of computing power

With the continuous acceleration of the development of the digital economy, as a new generation of fixed network communication technology, the importance of F5G has attracted more and more attention from the industry. At the 19th Huawei Global Analyst Conference, the "F5G Continues to Evolve to Promote the Prosperity of the Fixed Network Industry" summit organized by Informa Tech called on the industry to jointly promote the intergenerational evolution of F5G. Wang Guangquan, director of the Network Technology Research Center of China Unicom Research Institute, said that F5G will provide core key network capabilities for computing power, and operators should make every effort to build an all-optical base in order to play an important role in the construction of the digital economy.

Wang Guangquan, Director of Network Technology Research Center of China Unicom Research Institute

The digital economy places higher demands on the underlying network

In recent years, the digital economy has become an important engine leading economic and social changes and promoting high-quality economic development. The mainland attaches great importance to the development of the digital economy, and has successively issued relevant plans such as the "14th Five-Year Plan" Digital Economy Development Plan and the "14th Five-Year Plan" to Promote National Government Informatization.

How the information industry helps the digital economy, Wang Guangquan said in his speech that computing power is an important part of national competitiveness in the era of digital economy, and the new technology infrastructure represented by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain, etc., and the computing infrastructure represented by data centers and intelligent computing centers are becoming a key part of the new infrastructure. From the macro level, the development of the digital economy is positively correlated with the computing economy and the capacity economy, and the development of the digital economy with data as the core production factor is highly dependent on the "computing power of processing data" and "the capacity of the data transmission network", the deep integration of "computing power" and the gigabit optical fiber network, and the extensive coordination of all-optical transportation capacity and computing power will comprehensively promote the high-quality growth of the digital economy.

Therefore, Wang Guangquan believes that the all-optical base based on F5G technology has become an important part of the new generation of digital infrastructure, and telecom operators should focus on building an all-optical base.

Create an all-light base to help the era of computing power

In 2020, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute ETSI officially released F5G (Fifth Generation Fixed Communication Network Technology Intergeneration), which solved the problem of fragmentation and intergenerational unclear of the fixed network industry, and the global fixed network industry entered the fast lane of rapid development. The industry predicts that for 2030, with the application of XR, holographic, naked-eye 3D and other services in the home and enterprise side, F5G based on optical fiber networks will continue to deepen the industry, manufacturing and other fields, the industry's demand for green and sustainable development will increase, F5G needs to continue to evolve and enhance, providing greater bandwidth, lower latency, higher reliability, more diverse connections and higher energy efficiency ratio capabilities to achieve the industry vision goal of Fiber to Everywhere.

In this regard, Wang Guangquan believes that with the development of the entire high-speed optical communication, optical fiber resources are everywhere, the entire network can provide services from 2M to 10G and even the future 100G, especially in the era of computing power, this service must be deeply combined with computing power, and the all-optical network also realizes the continuous evolution from all-optical transmission to all-optical access, all-optical switching and ultra-broadband, super-intelligent, so as to create a larger platform for government, enterprises, families, and individuals to provide deeper digital services.

Wang Guangquan said that Since last year, China Unicom has proposed the cubeNet3.0 new generation infrastructure target architecture to achieve end-to-end services from simple network to digital information infrastructure as a whole, thereby improving the computing power of the entire network. Among them, the architecture of Unicom's all-optical base will evolve from the existing quality government and enterprise network to the quality computing network, in order to meet the requirements of ultra-low latency, ubiquitous optical access, green ultra-wide, intelligent agility and optical computing collaboration, provide richer business scenarios of lianshu + joint enterprise + lianjia, and create differentiated quality connections.

Build the world's leading computing power backbone network

In the construction of computing power network, China Unicom took the lead in building a backbone ROADM/OXC national network, basically forming an all-optical ROADM/OXC network architecture, achieving 100% coverage of IP169 supercore nodes and Unicom's own IDC (statistics by city), which can realize photoelectric collaborative scheduling between hubs, and highly match the demands of The East, Numbers and West Computing services.

In recent years, China Unicom has continued to sink ITS technology, from the long-distance backbone network, to the core of the metropolitan area network, to the edge access layer of the metropolitan area, and gradually build an end-to-end large-capacity all-optical network. Facing the urban and edge access layers, the industrial chain needs to develop low-cost 100G WDM technology so that 100G WDM can sink to counties, towns and towns more economically and reasonably, and build all-light cities and all-light villages. With the sinking of WDM, ROADM technology is also sinking, while the metro core node introduces high-dimensional ROADM or OXC, low-cost low-dimensional ROADM needs to be introduced for metro edge access, replacing the traditional MUX/DMUX/FOADM fixed networking, and realizing flexible dynamic networking in the metro area. For metro edge layer application scenarios, low-dimensional (4-dimensional/9-dimensional, etc.), fixed-grid WSS will have great cost advantages. On the basis of the full deployment of FTTH, China Unicom is also actively developing FTTR, further extending the optical connection to the room, providing each room with a gigabit high-quality, low-latency access network to achieve full coverage of the whole house.

At the same time, in order to ensure the stability of the optical service network architecture, China Unicom has created an all-optical anchor to promote comprehensive service access and a jump into the cloud. The all-optical anchor point is the connection point between the optical network and the service. Relying on the all-optical anchor, it can steadily promote comprehensive service access, improve resource utilization, and can realize the efficient and flexible bearing of Mbit/s to Gbit/s different rate levels of services based on PON, G.metro, OSU, OTN, WDM and other access methods, and continuously enhance the service perception ability of optical networks, extend optical networks to end users, provide ubiquitous optical connection services, and ensure that users can easily obtain and use computing power resources.

Wang Guangquan said that at the level of computing power application based on the all-light base, Unicom has carried out a lot of innovative application work in different provinces, such as realizing the integration of cloud and light in Shandong Unicom, completing the application of cloud light to government enterprises and hospitals; using OSU technology to replace Pe-OTN equipment with MSTP equipment in Hubei Unicom; and realizing AI and other technologies in Guangdong Unicom to empower the digital management of optical cables. Facing the future, whether it is technological innovation or rich applications, F5G needs to continue to develop to truly realize the all-optical access, all-optical transmission, all-optical intelligence, optical computing collaboration and green all-light base.

Author: Liu Qicheng

Editor-in-charge/Layout: Liu Jiang

Review: Shen Qing

Producer: Liu Qicheng

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