Recently, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority hosted the National Broadband Network Summit with the theme of "Gigabit For All" in Pakistan. The summit aims to bring together government and industry chain forces to promote Pakistan's digital economy by accelerating optical broadband deployment.
At the summit, a consensus is reached on improving the optical broadband penetration rate, and policies and regulations on ROW, public infrastructure sharing, and tax preferences are proposed to expand the coverage of optical broadband. The summit also proposed to build Islamabad into Pakistan's first gigabit city within five years. Feng Zhishan, President of Huawei's Optical Access Domain, delivered a keynote speech. He said that Huawei is looking forward to working with industry partners to make continuous innovations to expand optical broadband coverage, improve the broadband rate, deliver premium experience, build a digital highway for optical transmission, support Pakistan's digital economy development, and move forward towards a gigabit society.
Fiber broadband, like highways, railways, water, and electricity, is the key infrastructure of an economy and society. In addition, fiber broadband is an important engine for the digital economy and operator services, and plays a key role in promoting national economic development, employment, and industrial structure innovation. According to the World Bank's research, a 10% increase in the broadband penetration rate leads to an average GDP growth of 1.38%. Agriculture is an important part of Pakistan's national economy. Based on China's experience in agriculture, gigabit optical networks can help with e-commerce live streaming of agricultural products, increase the revenue of farmers and employment rate in rural areas, and deliver quality products directly to consumers. According to the statistics of China's National Bureau of Statistics, in 2023, the sales volume of agricultural products through e-commerce exceeded CNY73 billion in China. More than 1 million farmers sold agricultural products on the Internet, and the retail sales volume in rural areas reached CNY2.49 trillion.
In recent years, Pakistan has seen a rapid development in economy and higher demand for interconnection and digital services. Thanks to favorable policies from the teleco regulatory authority of Pakistan, and operators' proactive construction, the fiber broadband penetration rate has increased rapidly, the number of FTTH users has increased by more than 80% year-on-year, and FTTR and 400G have been put into commercial use.
Mr. Feng shared Huawei's experience in helping global partners build fiber broadband. Globally, the development of fiber broadband goes through three typical phases: fiber coverage, bandwidth acceleration, and experience improvement.
The first phase is fiber coverage. Efficient and economic FTTH deployment has always been a great challenge, requiring good planning and innovative solutions. Well-planned fiber construction is the first step and is proven to be a very effective way to save fiber investments and OSP costs. Huawei provides QuickConnect ODN solutions to realize end-to-end splicing-free connections and all-scenario AirPON to implement fast FTTH deployment. The solutions have been widely used in Nairobi Kenya and Chiang Mai Thailand, and are contributing to economic and social development and digital equality in these areas.
The second phase is bandwidth acceleration. Currently, most PON devices deployed on the live network of operators in Pakistan are GPON and XGS-PON devices, which support 100 Mps or even 10 Gbps optical broadband access. However, the packages launched by operators mainly provide 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps bandwidths, and the value of optical broadband is not fully utilized. It is recommended that operators upgrade their networks and packages to provide higher bandwidth for users. Huawei's FlexPON+ solution enables operators to smoothly upgrade GPON to 10G PON with the minimum investment, and supports a maximum access rate of 1000 Mbps. An operator in Malaysia has launched a 2000 Mbps package based on Huawei's FlexPON+ solution and increased ARPU by 30%.
The third phase is experience improvement. FTTR networking ensures ubiquitous and fast Wi-Fi experience anytime and anywhere. In addition, operators can use FTTR to provide more new services, such as converged storage, device-cloud synergy computing, Wi-Fi sensing, and smart home control. In this way, operators can shift from "one fiber" to "one network" and create a new smart home experience for home users. Oi Brazil and Huawei have jointly implemented large-scale commercial use of FTTR in Latin America. With advantages such as ultra-large bandwidth, ultra-wide coverage, ultra-massive concurrency, and 5A services, Oi has built differentiated competitiveness though innovation in the home broadband market.
In addition to FTTH broadband access, the optical transport network for backbone and metro transmission is the digital highway for national networks. Huawei is working closely with partners in Pakistan to build future-oriented optical networks with 400G/800G ultra-high speed, ultra-low latency, and high availability, facilitating digital transformation in various industries.
At the end of his speech, Mr. Feng said that the next decade will be the golden decade of digital infrastructure in Pakistan. Improving fiber coverage and bandwidth acceleration are the current priorities. We can refer to global development experience to formulate policies and provide financial support for fiber broadband development. Huawei is looking forward to working with partners to make innovations in network and service development, accelerate the development of fiber broadband, build intelligent access networks with premium experience, and help Pakistan move towards a gigabit society.
