Huawei introduces 400G optical network technology for commercial use

March 20, 2018
Huawei used the Optical Networking and Communication Conference & Exhibition (OFC) last week to introduce 400G optical network technology for commercial use. The technology is designed to provide rapid 400G optical network deployment for all service scenarios on carriers' networks.

Huawei used the Optical Networking and Communication Conference & Exhibition (OFC) last week to introduce 400G optical network technology for commercial use. The technology is designed to provide rapid 400G optical network deployment for all service scenarios on carriers' networks.

Huawei's 400G offering leverages its latest oDSP chips, which the company claims enables its platforms to surpass industry standards in transmission performance. It supports adjustable bandwidths at a tunable single-wavelength rate ranging from 100 Gbps to 400 Gbps. By delivering a variety of flexible configurations, this technology offers carriers accelerated 400G network deployment on live networks, says Huawei.

Huawei says its 400G optical network technology targets actual commercial scenarios to optimize high-speed optical transmission signals, including slicing, shaping, and compression, and balancing between theoretical limits and commercial use. Huawei asserts that it meets the requirements of a variety of service scenarios by giving the best possible transmission performance within transmission limits, including the following:

· In access, metro, and data center interconnect (DCI) scenarios, transmission distances are relatively short, but large bandwidths are necessary. Huawei says its 400G technology uses a simple configuration to deliver high capacity and spectral efficiency to decrease the cost of transmission. Additionally, this technology enhances single-wavelength 400G transmission performance by 50%, asserts Huawei, to address the demands of single-span and multi-span models that use different optical fibers. The technology does so by implementing error correction coding and a signal equalization algorithm.

· In backbone networks and some complex metro networks, single-wavelength 400G technology does not perform at the required threshold, says Huawei. To support carriers in efficiently deploying 400G backbone networks while using minimal bandwidth resources, Huawei's technology uses dual-channel 2 x 200G and optimization algorithms to compress the channel spacing. According to Huawei, this increases the spectral efficiency by 30% (nearing a single-wavelength rate of 400 Gbps), and stretches the aggregate 400G transmission distance to thousands of miles.

Huawei's 400G technology also improves network performance and lessens costs of network O&M by increasing the single-fiber capacity by 40%, and decreases power consumption by 40%, the company says.

"In the 5G era, ultra-high bandwidth will become a basic network requirement for carriers and high-speed transmission technology is the key," said Richard Jin, Huawei Transmission Network Product Line's president. "As 400G is becoming the trend of next-generation optical networks, Huawei will promote 400G transmission technology to satisfy carriers' requirements in all-service scenarios. As one of the earliest vendors in the world to deliver 400G, Huawei continuously seeks to build the most competitive premium transmission networks and enable global carriers to achieve commercial success."

In addition to focusing on actual commercial scenarios with its 400G optical network technology, Huawei has also been focusing on deploying its CloudFabric to support construction, including a private cloud resource pool for China Mobile's data centers (see "Huawei's Cloud Fabric to support China Mobile's private cloud resource pool").

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