During MWC 25 in Barcelona, Kim Jin, Vice President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, officially unveiled a full series of 10G smart OLTs at the Green All-Optical Summit. The products can help operators maintain business competitiveness in the broadband service domain for the next decade, ultimately promoting the smart upgrade of global optical access networks.
As the intelligent world materializes, scenarios like smart homes, smart enterprises, and smart manufacturing are coming to demand high-quality networks, posing higher requirements on optical access networks. The passive optical network (PON) is evolving towards 50G PON, requiring Tbit/s-level line-rate forwarding. This is a great test to the forwarding capability of OLTs. Operators are also gradually shifting focus to experience rather than bandwidth to avoid homogeneous competition, ultimately aiming to deliver low-latency, high-reliability, and deterministic experience.
To meet such evolving network needs, Huawei released the smart OLT MA5800T X17 at MWC 24 in Barcelona, which can provide ultra-high bandwidth, deterministic experience, and native intelligence. Inside China, Huawei has provided services to many operators, for example, Shanghai Telecom, who launched 10G broadband packages using Huawei technology. Outside China, Huawei has provided 10G home broadband/enterprise services for Finland, Switzerland, Qatar, Hong Kong, and Seychelles.
This year, Huawei launched small-, medium-, and large-capacity OLTs of X15, X8, and X2 to meet differentiated capacity requirements for all scenarios while ensuring scalability, technological evolution, and cost-effectiveness.
In terms of scenario-based deployment, X17 and X15 are used in large-scale core equipment rooms. They support full-service convergence and high-density access. X8 is used in medium-sized regional aggregation scenarios to strike a balance between capacity and cost. X2 is used in edge scenarios to support flexible deployment.
In terms of technological evolution and compatibility, all models support hybrid networking for GPON, 10G PON, and 50G PON. Operators can flexibly adjust service boards to adapt to technological upgrades, protecting network investments.
In terms of cost and energy efficiency optimization, operators can select the number of slots and board types they need, no more, no less. Small-sized devices have lower power consumption, and large-sized devices use a distributed architecture alongside boards with low power consumption to reduce the energy consumption of a single user.
In addition to the preceding three points, the MA5800T series has been upgraded in forwarding, capacity, and intelligence to build an all-optical 10 Gbps base for a fully connected, intelligent world.
Upgrades to forwarding: The MA5800T series OLTs implement commercial 1T ultra-broadband backplanes, 1T ultra-broadband control boards, and Tbit/s-level upstream capabilities. All of these are future-proof for the next decade, providing strong support for operators' development towards next-generation 200G PON.
Upgrades to capacity: Optical modules are encapsulated in SFP mode which is an upgrade to the QSFP mode. This increases the port density of 50G PON boards from 8 ports to 16. The new encapsulation mode better supports the 1:1 upgrade of existing 16-port GPON/10G PON boards and further optimizes network resource utilization.
Upgrades to intelligence: Huawei has created the FAN Intelligent Engine (FIE) architecture for the AI-native access network. It transforms the best-effort pipes to app-level private lines (app flow) at the connection layer. It also opens network capabilities to enable QoD-based NaaS, and helps operators realize bandwidth monetization. The architecture further uses the intelligent and collaborative Wi-Fi network to improve the throughput of the entire network. In addition, it provides a computing bus and distributed inference framework to support OLT+FTTR+X+AI collaboration, providing on-demand computing power for smart homes and enterprises.
As time goes on, Huawei will continue to invest and innovate in the optical access domain and work with global operators, customers, and partners to bring optical connections to everywhere and build a fully connected, intelligent world. This 10G smart OLT series not only marks another major breakthrough in the optical access domain, but also provides efficient solutions for global operators to upgrade their networks, helping them maintain a frontward position among fierce market competition.
