Huawei

Reading guide: Education is at the heart of national development. Countries around the world focus on the digital transformation of education, making it an important development goal. Huawei's FTTO solution builds a unified bearer network that is fully connected, sensed, and intelligent for every teaching, management, and research service. This solution meets the construction and reconstruction requirements of campus networks in various scenarios and builds a green all-optical base for smart education.

Digital capabilities are increasingly integrated into education, along with the emergence of digital technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI). This drives the education field to redefine the learning experience, personalized teaching, and student development.

In recent years, an increasing number of countries have launched national digital development strategies to implement scientific, technological, and economic development. The EU, Japan, Singapore, and China have formulated laws and action plans that drive infrastructure construction and digital transformation of education, as well as provide high-speed, convenient, green, and secure network services.

Networks, as the foundation of smart campus construction, must provide higher rates and wider coverage while ensuring network security and environmental protection due to the great transition in the era of smart education. Smart campuses around the world are constructed for multiple scenarios and services, resulting in new teaching environments and methods that demand data collection and transmission.

The impact of smart education on the current network is as follows:

• New smart teaching applications are transforming how education is carried out. Since the resulting explosion in traffic cannot be carried on existing network bandwidth, network capacity needs to expand. In universities, smart classrooms and large-scale open online teaching have become commonplace. A major area of focus in basic education expands the egress bandwidth of schools.
• Along with the continuous rollout of new services such as remote education, digital library, and cloud-based teaching, there are more “daily life" scenarios of smart campus. The surge of applications and services takes a greater toll on coordinating resources like equipment rooms, further taxing network deployment. Provisioning network services also becomes more complex, taking time for the new services to roll out.
• Due to complex networks and services, the fault rate of ring network storms is high. Since traditional organization and method (O&M) cannot always detect every user’s experience, they cannot guarantee the network experience of teachers and students.

Using Huawei FTTO Solution to Build a Green All-Optical Base for Smart Campuses

F5G—the fifth-generation fixed network—uses optical fibers as its communications media. F5G has advantages such as ultra-high bandwidth, guaranteed experience, and simple O&M, making it ideal for smart campus construction.

Harnessing F5G, the Huawei FTTO solution replaces aggregation switches with passive optical splitters in extra-low voltage (ELV) rooms or other public areas. Fibers are extended to the network edge and connected to optical network units (ONUs), replacing access switches that are deployed near service access points such as offices, dormitories, and classrooms.

The upcoming video elaborates features of Huawei’s FTTO solution.

Compared with traditional campus network solutions, the F5G-based Huawei FTTO solution has the following advantages:

Simplified architecture and energy saving: Besides low-carbon and eco-friendly fibers, the all-optical network uses a flat two-layer network structure and replaces active devices at the traditional aggregation layer with the passive optical distribution network (ODN). This overcomes the 100-meter transmission distance limitation of copper cables. It reduces extra-low voltage (ELV) room space and cabling by 80 percent and power consumption by 30 percent, enabling sustainable campus development.

Ultra-high bandwidth, future-proofing networks: The upstream and downstream bandwidth of all-optical networks can smoothly evolve from 2.5 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s or even 50 Gbit/s. The dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithm dynamically adjusts the bandwidth to meet the varying requirements of smart classrooms and VR/AR-based immersive teaching applications. Integrated online and offline teaching gives teachers and students a premium experience. Fibers are also corrosion-resistant and have a service life of 30 years. In other words, if you upgrade your network bandwidth, you only need to replace boards or optical modules.

Smart and simple O&M, enabling one person to manage one campus: The all-optical network integrates wired, wireless, IoT, and 5G networks and implements unified O&M and configuration delivery management on the network management system (NMS). Since optical network units (ONUs) are plug-and-play and hot-swappable, O&M is simplified, costs are reduced, and improvement in efficiency by 60 percent.

High security and reliability, dual protection for link data: Based on the XGS-PON/GPON technology, the Huawei FTTO solution uses a brand-new enhanced frame format and comprehensive encryption functions. The common Ethernet frame format analysis software cannot capture or identify the frame format, let alone the encapsulated packets. Compared with the Ethernet access solution, the Huawei FTTO solution is more secure and reliable, making it suitable for various campus scenarios. The hard pipe-slicing technology can also be used for network isolation by dividing a physical network into multiple physical-like networks. This technology supports multi-network integration, ensuring hard isolation between multiple networks for dedicated use.

Long-distance coverage for fair education: Class D optical modules support an ultra-long transmission distance of 40 km, making them ideal for unified network construction of district/county education metro networks. One network can cover every primary and secondary school in the district or county. This is achieved through the interconnection between schools and education bureaus and by sharing resources between urban and rural schools, ultimately reducing the construction and O&M costs of a single campus network. In addition, the Huawei FTTO solution allows sharing high-quality teaching resources and promotes education fairness.

Huawei's FTTO solution builds a unified bearer network that is fully connected, sensed, and intelligent for every teaching, management, and research service.

Huawei's FTTO solution has seen significant uptake globally, from primary and secondary schools to vocational colleges and universities. In all these settings, it helps enrich teaching modes, optimize teaching environments, and reinvent teaching concepts.

Invested by Cape Breton University, the University of Canada in Egypt is a high-end comprehensive private university that adopted the Huawei FTTO solution to deploy networks for its new campus in 2018. After carrying out the site survey, it was found that the horizontal library distance exceeds 200 m. In the traditional solution, two ELV rooms are reserved on each floor. However, if the Huawei FTTO solution is adopted, the cabling and ELV room space can be drastically lowered, reducing the engineering cost. Consequently, the university adopted the Huawei FTTO solution to provide unified access to data, video, and voice services. The stable campus network offers a premium user experience and helps the university adopt modern teaching methods. Teachers and students can seamlessly use various Internet education applications any time, wherever they are on campus.

Continuous Innovation for Smarter Education

To better meet the requirements of teachers and students, Huawei works with partners to build a fiber broadband network featuring 10G to the school and gigabit to the desktop, making innovative activities such as remote teaching, collaborative learning, and immersive learning more convenient. Through technology and product innovation, the network quality of universities is greatly improved. One network can carry all services in multiple campus scenarios, making smart campus construction more efficient and convenient.

The Huawei FTTO solution also facilitates the overall upgrade of campus network infrastructure and promotes modern and ICT-based education. By doing this, the Internet and education are organically integrated while contributing to lower costs and increased efficiency.

Huawei will continue working closely with partners to promote technical innovation and application implementation, ultimately unleashing more industry potential.

[Visit Huawei’s website to find out more.]