Text/Huang Haifeng
2020 is the first year of 5G large-scale commercial use, and 47 countries around the world have released 106 5G commercial networks. We see that in the construction of minimalist 5G networks, 5G microwave, a base station backhaul technology, has been increasingly deployed.
It is understood that since its release in 2018, 5G microwave has been successfully commercialized in more than 70 networks around the world, especially in the Middle East, where the first wave of 5G construction was made, and about 60% of 5G sites used 5G microwave backhaul. Operators use 5G microwave to build networks, shortening network construction time by 70% and reducing TCO by nearly 40%, providing fiber-like network experience for 4K video, VR and other services.
A new report from Dell'Oro predicts that the demand for microwave transmission equipment will reach $17 billion over the next five years. It is also understood that Huawei is a leader in the field of 5G microwave, and has gained nearly 35% of the global market in the field of operator mobile backhaul. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said last year that there are not many manufacturers in the world that can do a good job in microwaves, and Huawei is the most advanced.
So, for operators who are building 5G networks on a large scale, what are the advantages of 5G microwave? What value can 5G microwave bring in scenarios such as 5G toB? As an industry leader, what 5G microwave innovation will Huawei bring? At the recent 2020 Global Mobile Broadband Forum, the author spoke with Yang Xi, President of Huawei's Microwave Product Line.
The industry recognizes 5G microwave technology, and many operators benefit from it
From 2G to 4G, base stations need to return data to the control plane and data plane, in china, Japan and South Korea countries with rich optical fibers, the base station mobile backhaul uses optical fiber backhaul technology in large quantities, but in the region excluding China, Japan and South Korea, about 70% of the world's base stations are microwave backhaul. However, most of the 5G base stations work in the medium frequency band, and a single base station is about 5 to 10Gbps capacity, so compared with 4G base stations, the capacity of 5G base stations has increased greatly, the number has increased greatly, and the density has increased greatly.
This means that 5G networks have a huge demand for optical cable resources. You know, the cost of optical cables is not high, but the cost of laying is very high. In Europe and the United States and other regions, the land is sparsely populated, the labor cost of laying optical cables is high and the income is low; in Southeast Asia, Indonesia and other island countries, the cost of submarine cables is also very high; in China, the cost of fiber optic cable laying is low, but it requires high deployment and coordination costs, and there are also a large number of fiber-free areas and scenarios.
In the above areas and scenarios, microwave, which has a history of more than 100 years of wireless backhaul, plays a huge role, construction is fast and low TCO, and is widely used in the field of mobile communications. Of course, from 4G to 5G, there are still some operators who are worried about whether 5G microwave can meet the needs of 5G services such as large bandwidth, low latency, and high reliability.
Yang Xi concluded that the industry has three major concerns about 5G microwave, one is that the capacity is not enough, because 5G has increased by 10 times compared with 4G capacity; the second is that the latency is not low, and the 5G uRLLC service has strict latency requirements; the third is that the cost is low, because many overseas operators have insufficient overall optical fiber resources, and whether they can maintain or further increase the advantages of network building TCO in the case that microwave solutions can meet bandwidth and latency needs.
So, can 5G microwaves be used in the end? "Microwave technology can be used in 5G networks, and it performs better in performance such as delay." Yang Xi said.
For example, in terms of delay, microwave technology uses wireless, and the short-distance data transmission rate is close to the speed of light. The signal is propagated in a reflective manner in the optical fiber, and the physical deployment line is curved, and the propagation path is longer than the microwave. The delay of microwave technology is about 20-50us, which can fully meet the latency requirements of 5.5G or even 6G. Since 2018, 5G microwave has been successfully commercialized in more than 70 networks around the world, and has been successfully used for 5G bearer in the Middle East, which is enough to explain the cost-effective value of 5G microwave.
The author found that 5G microwave is "not only available, but also good to use", accelerating the deployment of 5G networks and allowing operators to enjoy 5G dividends. Yang Xi said that 5G microwave has a greater acceleration effect on the 5G industry, for example, in China, it can help operators to quickly open 5G in fiber-free areas. Overseas, it can help operators to cover 4G LTE in depth and smoothly evolve to 5G in the future.
Speaking of the specific value brought by 5G microwave to operators, Yang Xi gave an example of the transmission of microwave equipment used by 95% of the 5G base stations of an operator in Saudi Arabia. In the recent Saudi government's 5G network quality evaluation, the operator's 5G network quality score is the best, because it has the best coverage, the lowest latency, the best gaming experience, and truly achieves a download rate similar to that of optical fiber.
Such a high-quality 5G microwave network has also enabled the Saudi operator to achieve market success, saving 50% of the end-to-end network deployment costs and nearly 70% of the deployment time on the one hand, and nearly 50% of the 5G market users on the other hand
Under the influence of the epidemic this year, the network traffic in various countries has increased sharply, and even congested, operators are more aware of the importance and urgency of mobile broadband networks, so they pay more attention to the application of microwave technology. For example, the MBBF 5G microwave industry roundtable has been actively participated by representatives of operators in various countries.
5G microwave can support the prosperity of 5G industry applications
4G changes lives, 5G changes society. The biggest value of 5G is to promote the digitization of vertical industries such as finance, mining, education, transportation, and industrial interconnection. What is the unique value of 5G microwave in 5G ToB scenarios?
In this regard, Yang Xi said that 5G is ultra-broadband, microwave is also ultra-broadband, but also has the advantages of low latency, low cost and rapid deployment, especially suitable for providing private line services. 20 to 30% of the microwave of European and African operators is used to provide enterprise private line services.
In the future 5.5G era, the spectrum will move higher (Sub 100GHz), and 5G microwave has now been commercially used in Sub6G ~ 86GHz, which can provide ultra-large bandwidth, ultra-low latency and ultra-long distance, and flexible deployment, which is very suitable for the needs of wireless transmission of large amounts of data, such as video data. For example, 5G microwaves well support the wireless large-scale data transmission needs of rare wild animals and natural resources protection, wildlife protection and monitoring, radio and television wireless digital coverage, railway intelligent locomotive maintenance, smart urban rail, electricity, oil and gas, water transportation, tunnels, smart construction sites, etc.
In the wild forest no man's land in Sichuan, 5G microwave construction is easier and more flexible than optical fiber, with wide coverage, which can well transmit high-definition surveillance video of wild pandas.
For example, data such as video surveillance of railway locomotives need to be automatically imported into the intelligent analysis system in a short period of time. In the past, manual dumping or WiFi transmission was time-consuming. Now Huawei is cooperating with relevant domestic institutions to explore the use of large-capacity millimeter wave technology to quickly transmit, and the data acquisition efficiency is increased by more than 10 times.
Addressing challenges: Huawei promotes three major 5G microwave innovations
In 2020, about 1 million 5G base stations will be built worldwide. In the future, as 5G deployment deepens, 5G network coverage increases and deployment becomes more intensive, which puts forward greater bandwidth requirements, longer deployment distances and lower deployment costs for backhaul networks.
For microwaves, the contradiction between limited spectrum resources and larger capacity, the contradiction between higher frequency bands and longer transmission distances has become more prominent, and the demand of operators for low-cost and rapid 5G networks has become more urgent.
In this regard, this year, Huawei continued to innovate and break through microwave technology in three aspects: first, it broke through the transmission distance and covered more scenarios; second, it broke through the spectral efficiency, with greater capacity and more directions, and continued to improve the spectral efficiency; third, it broke through the deployment limit, achieved minimalist installation, and continued to reduce the customer's site installation cost.
Yang Xi introduced that after applying technologies such as high-order modulation methods, multi-band carrier aggregation, and MIMO, Huawei's 5G microwave can meet the backhaul requirements of base stations in the 5G era of 10-20 Gbps. Huawei believes that E-Band microwaves have the greatest growth potential in the 5G era. E-Band refers to the microwave band operating near 80GHz, the actual allocation band is 71-76GHz and 81-86GHz, and the total available bandwidth is up to 10GHz.
Huawei's 5G microwave long-range E-band solution
Traditional band microwave (6-42GHz) spectrum resources are becoming increasingly tight, bandwidth capacity is limited, and E-Band microwaves are gradually developing from traditional enterprise market applications to operator-level large-bandwidth service bearer networks because of its advantages of rich band resources, large transmission capacity, low spectrum usage fees, and high-frequency narrow beam adaptation to dense deployment.
In view of the large number of overseas operators' continuous development, construction, upgrading and expansion scenarios of 4G/4.5G, Huawei has created an innovative architecture to apply 5G microwave technology to 4G/4.5G networks in advance, and through the application of CA functions and modular antennas, it can increase capacity and save more than 30% of network construction costs for customers' E2E: on the one hand, it will improve the carrying capacity of 4G/4.5G networks, and on the other hand, it will prepare for the smooth evolution of 5G
"5G microwave is a cost-effective wireless transmission method that meets some of the performance defined by 5.5G and can continue to be carried forward in the 6G era." Yang Xi said.
Continuous innovation and market leadership
Ren Zhengfei once said that there is only one company in the world that can combine 5G base stations and the most advanced microwave technology to become a base station, that is, Huawei. Third-party data shows that in the global microwave transmission market, Huawei's operator mobile backhaul market share has reached nearly 35%, which is the pressure on Nokia and Ericsson.
How does Huawei achieve innovation and market leadership in the field of 5G microwave? Yang Xi told the author that first of all, Huawei has made a lot of microwaves very early, and continues to invest and invest a lot, maintaining technical leadership in architecture, RADIO frequency process, software algorithms and other aspects.
In 2008, Huawei released the first IP microwave in the industry, which promoted the rapid transformation of the industry to IP microwave upgrading, and also made Huawei microwave grow rapidly. Since then, huawei has achieved the leadership of microwave technology from IP microwave to pure packet microwave, to introducing routing characteristics to microwave, and then to 5G microwave using carrier aggregation technology.
"The development of our microwave technology has absorbed huawei's fixed network capabilities on IP, and also absorbed Huawei's capabilities in wireless, from baseband to RF end-to-end innovation, maintaining technology leadership." Yang Xi said.
According to the author's understanding, Huawei's microwave product sales revenue exceeds 1 billion US dollars, of which more than 12% is invested in innovative technology research.
Secondly, Huawei has a large number of top microwave experts in the industry and has established multiple research institutes and laboratories around the world. Huawei has the world's largest number of microwave technology developers (more than 700 people) and many top experts. For example, Renato Lombardi, chairman of the ETSI Millimeter Wave Alliance, is Huawei's Fallow.
Since the hometown of microwave technology is in Milan, Huawei has set up a microwave research institute in Milan for top experts to conduct cutting-edge technology research. Huawei is also conducting research on key microwave algorithms in Moscow and commercializing microwave equipment projects in Chengdu and Xi'an, China, to promote commercial implementation.
Yang Xi said that Huawei's 5G microwave can bring optical fiber-like experience whether it is in the seaside with high salt and high corrosion, or in the tropical area with high temperature and high sunshine, or the iceberg of ice and snow, and the bad weather of wild storms and rain. For example, huawei has proposed a series of innovative and reliable solutions for the microwave transmission bandwidth and distance bottlenecks in a large number of "P" rainy areas (the areas with the largest rainfall) in the Asia-Pacific region (Indonesia, etc.).
Huawei's 5G microwave relies on a reliability test lab that costs a lot of money. These laboratories conduct rigorous tests on Huawei's 5G microwaves, so that Huawei's 5G microwaves can stand in a variety of environments, so that users in difficult areas of many countries around the world can access the network.
Finally, Huawei Microwave has a lot of deployment experience and strong strength in delivery and service. Yang Xi introduced that Huawei has the ability to deliver wireless networks end-to-end. This means that when building 5G, operators can deploy base stations, microwaves, energy and other equipment at the same time in a period of time, rather than deploying multiple times, greatly reducing costs.
It should also be known that many overseas countries need to use cranes and road closures when building 5G base stations. If a manufacturer can deliver end-to-end at one time, it will be deployed quickly and the cost will be reduced. However, if multiple manufacturers deliver multiple times, operators are costly and slow to deploy.
In addition, based on AI and other technologies, Huawei provides a large number of digital planning, deployment, and acceptance tools developed by itself to help operators interact efficiently and achieve rapid and large-scale deployment of 5G networks in the future.
Observation: 5G microwave can accelerate the construction of 5G scale
Overall, 5G microwave, as a fast and economical 5G deployment backhaul technology, plays an increasingly important role in 5G backhaul. Huawei's continuous innovation in 5G microwave in three aspects brings all-scenario and efficient microwave backhaul solutions, accelerating operators' 5G construction and industry application development.
Looking to the future, Yang Xi called for the rapid development of 5G microwaves to require the joint efforts of global governments, operators, and equipment manufacturers. In terms of technological innovation, industry standards have been formed through industrial organizations; regulatory calls on governments to reduce the price of microwave spectrum and allow operators to reduce the cost pressure of deploying 5G; and jointly explore the application of 5G microwave in different scenarios in industry applications.
5G microwave, the future can be expected.