ODN seeks balance between quality and cost

The national “Twelfth Five-Year Plan” has brought new historical opportunities for triple-play convergence and broadband speeding. Under this background, major telecom operators regard user bandwidth as a weapon of competition and take the initiative in the new value chain under the “end”, “management”, and “cloud” architectures. In order to adapt to the new situation, operators need to speed up the construction of FTTx optical fiber broadband network, expand and expand the pipeline, and maintain the core advantages of the pipeline. How to construct FTTx networks at a low cost, especially ODN networks that account for a large amount of costs of FTTH networks, has become a focus issue for operators.

ODN is an important part of the FTTH network and currently faces many problems such as lack of standards, uneven quality of products, and management confusion. Therefore, telecom operators need to lead all parties in the industry chain to actively explore Solutions.

The ODN standardization problem to be solved In the aspect of ODN standardization, it is necessary to form a strict corporate norm as soon as possible and provide technical support to the users.

As a bearer network with a passive access network, ODN embodies the advantages of passive network to reduce maintenance, but also shows the great difficulty of access network construction. In the earlier period, due to the small scale of domestic fiber access network construction, the focus was mainly on equipment technology, and the corresponding research on ODN lags behind. After entering the large-scale construction period, some difficult problems faced by ODN gradually emerged, among which the problem of standardization was particularly prominent.

At present, the standardization process of ODN products is slow. Therefore, in the subsequent development of standards, either because the different technologies in the standards are more controversial and the progress is delayed, or the lower standards of existing products have to be moved to bury the quality risks.

However, other inherent challenges faced by ODN are further promoting the lack of ODN standards. For example, ODN networks have poor long-term stability. Each fiber access user to the central office equipment is formed by connecting multiple optical cables and optical devices, and any one component will definitely affect the stability. However, in the absence of current detection methods and difficult detection of ODN products, inevitably there are many “fish heads” mixed in. If a large-scale deployment is carried out, it will inevitably cause serious hidden dangers for the overall network quality, and standardization can help. Industry screening low quality products enter the market.

Therefore, it is necessary to form a strict corporate norm as soon as possible to provide technical support to practical users everywhere. At the same time, in the current domestic ODN wiring product market is more chaotic, low-standard products are full of market when the need to strengthen the post-assessment mechanism.

Operators need to build a quality control system. Costs and quality must be balanced. Operators can establish quality control systems to ensure product quality.

As a whole, at present, ODN is still in the initial stage of construction. Operators are still exploring the specifications of products, construction modes, and construction, and it is still difficult to form a relatively complete standard system in the short term. At the same time, there are many domestic ODN equipment suppliers, and the types of equipment are complex, which has led to uneven quality of ODN equipment.

The success of the FTTH network operation depends largely on the quality of the service. The quality of the service depends on the quality of the ODN. As the basic network of FTTH, ODN must be able to bear the business needs of the next 20 years or more. ODN construction has the characteristics of many hidden projects and long design life. Once ODN quality fails to meet the standards, the cost of rework and reconstruction will be very high.

In terms of construction quality, the process and flow of ODN construction must be considered. When FTTH enters the stage of scale deployment, operators or their partners are not required to train more professional construction personnel through complete engineering specifications and systematic training. Compared to the copper wiring network, the optical fiber construction requires higher processing. In particular, indoor wiring is a relatively new topic for operators, and involves the user's own individual needs. Therefore, it is necessary to formulate reasonable indoor wiring specifications in order to better guide the high-quality construction of indoor wiring.

At present, there are a large number of domestic suppliers of ODN products. From mainstream telecommunications equipment vendors such as Huawei, ZTE, and Fiberhome, to cable companies such as Hengtong Optoelectronics, and emerging companies such as Sunsea, the entire ODN industry is still growing. Also faced a further shuffle. Lin Rui, the network development division of China Telecom Group, said that for ODN's series of products, cost and quality need to be balanced, maintain reasonable costs, and establish a quality control system to ensure long-term product quality assurance.

The evolution of ODN intelligence is imperative for the relatively chaotic management of computer rooms and the relative lack of fixed-line resources, providing a market for smart ODNs.

While actively developing standards and establishing a quality product control system, telecom operators are exploring smarter ODN networks. The efficiency of traditional ODN investment and construction is difficult to match. On the one hand, because the passive network is not transparent, the optical fiber cannot be clearly managed. On the other hand, due to the management error of network resources, the operation and maintenance efficiency is low, and the maintenance cost is increased. The smart ODN is born for this purpose.

The core of the smart ODN is the accuracy of resource management. Each optical port and link point is added with an RFID or eID tag, and the data is automatically identified and collected accordingly. This can help operators design institutes to make reasonable plans for large-scale ODN networks, accurately manage massive optical fiber ports, and implement automatic service provisioning and distribution based on user information.

In response to the current ODN network environment, in the face of massive optical fiber growth, major carriers are unable to do anything, putting tremendous pressure on their operation and maintenance, and the complexity of service development is also increasing. According to statistics, at this stage, there are more than 15,000 optical fibers in the center of the operator's center. Each time fiber fault diagnosis takes about 25 minutes, and subsequent manual processing takes several hours, and the fiber utilization check is more tedious. In this situation, the intelligent ODN network is ready to go.

At this stage, mainstream manufacturers such as Huawei, ZTE, and Fiberhome have proposed an intelligent ODN network system with independent intellectual property rights, covering all aspects such as planning, design, construction, and maintenance. The use of intelligent ODN can realize end-to-end intelligence, greatly improving the degree of automation of fiber deployment and reducing manual operations, thereby accelerating deployment efficiency, increasing the availability of fiber resources and the efficiency of network operation and maintenance, and ultimately reducing overall deployment costs. . The future ODN network intelligence is an inevitable trend of its development.

Zhang Chengliang, deputy chief engineer of the Beijing Research Institute of China Telecom, stated: "The telecommunication's positioning of the smart ODN lies in the management of massive optical fiber, so we can achieve: 100% automated management of information; 100% port and fiber routing information is accurate; 100% The optical fiber link can be opened and the link quality can be guaranteed."

It is understood that although China Telecom is not currently testing the smart ODN at the group, according to the pilot conditions in different regions, the group's testing is not far away. Compared with the other two operators, China Unicom's computer room management is relatively confusing and the relative lack of China Mobile's fixed-line resources provides a broader market for smart ODNs.