FTTR Creates a New Industry Benefiting from the Whole Industry Chain

At the 2022 China Optical Network Symposium held recently, Ao Li, chief engineer of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, delivered a keynote speech on FTTR. Ao Li believes that there are three major industrial foundations for the development of FTTR:

First, the penetration rate of fiber-to-the-home tends to be saturated, and the user accounted for 95%. Especially as of May this year, the number of users with gigabit and above speeds has reached 55.91 million, a year-on-year increase of 358.6%, creating a new era for FTTR. Good user base.

Second, my country’s optical communication industry chain has a strong foundation. In terms of optical access equipment, Huawei, ZTE, FiberHome and other companies have more than half of the global market share; Yuan and other enterprises rank among the top 10 in the world.

Third, FTTR supporting indoor wiring technology is maturing. Including new accessories such as indoor special ultra-soft butterfly cable, cable panel, and invisible optical cable and other product designs, to meet the needs of FTTR indoor wiring.

National policies also support FTTR development. The “Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Digital Homes and Improving Residential Quality” jointly issued by 16 departments including the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development clearly stated: “Encourage the construction of fiber-to-the-room and fiber-to-the-desktop, and strive to improve the quality of residential indoor networks.”

Ao Li emphasized that, on the other hand, operators are also willing to deploy FTTR driven by competition. Firstly, it can make up for shortcomings and realize full-service operation; secondly, it can win high business demand and high-value users; finally, it can also enhance the market competitiveness of operators and improve profitability.

At present, the development of technical standards for FTTR has been initiated at home and abroad. Compared with the traditional FTTx (including FTTH), FTTR can access the operator’s network through the main optical modem uplink 10G PON, eliminating the access bottleneck, providing users with stable large-bandwidth access capabilities, stronger indoor coverage capabilities, and Network visibility and manageability. Ao Li pointed out that this requires FTTR to make innovations in technologies such as optical link technology, Wi-Fi control technology and remote management.

Ao Li pointed out that FTTR has created a new industry that benefits from the entire industry chain. In the pre-installation market, operators and real estate developers can pre-install optical networks to realize fiber-to-the-room, and decoration companies pre-deploy home optical networks; Home optical network deployment; decoration companies can provide FTTR Gigabit all-optical network fiber deployment and construction to build home optical networks. With the development of new markets, the equipment industry chain also benefits. This is a whole new track.