PETER DYKES MONETISING FIBRE
We’re almost getting to the point where the bandwidth is becoming irrelevant as a point of differentiation
and all in all, 5G RAN architectures are really evolving and the reason is to be able to adapt to the growing user base, but also to enable new application and requirements. That being said, the one key thing we all agree on is that fibre will remain the most efficient way to connect and transport information through the infrastructure.” He says the key trends include the massive MIMO deployments which continue to increase, the continuing adoption of ECP as a front haul protocol, and cloud RAN adoption with the combination of mobile edge compute. In addition, there is small cell deployment, fibre to the room, fibre to the home, and all the small cells that will come with those. And then the application of the cell sites and the RU’s and DU’s. All of those together are some of the key trends that are happening, and they all lead to thinking about what technologies could be implement in this infrastructure. Khan says, “So when these trends come to pass, we’ll be prepared to make use of the benefits, and then offer that value proposition at the consumer level, and we’ll start to see which areas and opportunities are there to innovate. From an IC technology point of view, meaning ICs that connect the end-to-end of the fibre, they have to live on each end of this fibre network. The key challenge here is that our ICs will have to continue to support increased optical progress. We’ve had 10 Gig, this has moved to 25 Gig, and we are now looking at 50 Gig, and we have to go beyond, so it does not stop there. We have to start thinking 50 Gig will be critical right now, but it’s very important that we start thinking about scaling forward as well.” OTHER POSSIBILITIES Andrew Lord, senior manager, Optical Research at BT agrees, but says there is something else on the horizon. He said, “So far, in the discussion of PON, everyone’s been talking about GPON, XGS PON, 25G PON and 50G PON, but there’s something else coming. In fact, it’s nearly here and it’s going to be in my lab in the next couple of months. It is called XR Optics. Essentially, it’s coherent PON ready to go, certainly, within a year or so. It is using digital subcarrier technology to take a 400 Gig transceiver and to digitally turn it into individual 25 Gig streams. So, if you really want that kind of bandwidth, the consumer internet seriously does not need it, but small cells and macro cells may well need that kind of bandwidth, and there we have a Coherent PON- like technology that that’s ready to go. This may well be the end game for where things like PON are headed.”
accuracy on the location of our ducts of our fibres? If we could do that, I think that it would unlock vast monetization in terms of how we can sell that infrastructure, and how we might turn that into reliability. This is something I don’t think is trivial.” He said that at the moment, his team at BT Labs is looking at the use cases that might come from building some kind of digital twin that isn’t just a copy of the network, but it is a copy that can respond and react to network changes instantly. He explains, “A fibre network is very fast, very high bandwidth. So, we could have a real time view of the entire network changing as things change as there are problems in the network. From that, we can convert that into datasets, which we could sell and turn into external products.” He also said that in collaboration with Toshiba, BT Labs have launched a commercial Quantum Service in London, which is a map of the London quantum network, showing three quantum-enabled nodes in major BT exchanges in London, which use the fibre to distribute security via secret keys via single photons. Customers on this network are using the network for security, rather than for data, which is yet another way of monetising fibre. CONCLUSION It certainly seems there are new ways of monetising fibre which have yet to be discovered, but it is clear from this discussion that optical technology will have to go through many stages of development to reveal them. NB: The webinar participants discussed far more topics and in far greater detail than can be covered here, but a full replay of the webinar can be found on the Optical Connections website.
But Lord has other ideas about fibre monetisation, essentially by utilising the characteristics of the fibre in the ground. He said, “Can we turn [fibre] into a sensor and why would we want to do that? I think we might want to do it for our own benefit to make sure that our network is really well managed, operated, is reliable and that we understand it. And secondly, we might be able to sell data on that network. We might be able to sell the datasets that we get from the centre network and if you think about a typical fibre network, it often runs along roads, streets and highways. Often going in the same directions are things that we’re interested in, for example, traffic, and other types of capacity. There are some very serious issues regarding our infrastructure, there are many different types of cable, different sorts of duct, different depths of duct, different types of substrates, different types of PON and fibre access technology and different connections. All of these things make the understanding of our fibre infrastructure really challenging. I think that a sensing technology could really help operators to have a much better grasp of our underlying infrastructure.
Why would we want to do that? I think it might help us make our
infrastructure much more reliable, and much more. Someone talked about the benefits to consumers of more than just bandwidth. What could those user benefits be? And for sure, the main one for me is availability. It’s ensuring that this network, which is providing Gigabits per second to customers stays up.” He added, “Can we convert our really complex underground infrastructure into a digital twin, which gives us millimetre or centimetre
Doug Blue Business Development North America, Nokia.
Ronan Kelly CTO, EMEA, Adtran.
Raza Khan Senior Marketing Manager, Wireless Products, Signal Integrity Group, Semtech.
Andrew Lord Senior Manager, Optical Research, BT.
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| ISSUE 30 | Q3 2022
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