5G entire industry chain stimulates demand for optical modules
2021-11-18
Operators are making efforts to build 5G base stations, and the demand for optical modules continues to expand. In 2019, my country has built more than 130,000 5G base stations. 2020 is the first year of large-scale construction of 5G base stations, which mainly cover urban areas. In 2020, 5G network construction will focus on more SA networking, with higher commercial value. During the two sessions in 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that my country added more than 10,000 base stations every week. According to the operator's investment plan, the three major operators will build 700,000 base stations in September 2020, and the construction will not stop from September to December. With China Radio and Television as a new entrant, the joint construction of 700MHZ 5G base stations with China Mobile is expected to be further expanded. Optical modules are the basic building blocks of the physical layer of 5G networks and are widely used in wireless and transmission equipment. The 5G network is mainly composed of three main parts, namely the wireless network, the bearer network, and the core network. The proportion of its cost in system equipment continues to increase, with some equipment even exceeding 50-70%, which is a key element of 5G's low cost and wide coverage. Compared with 4G, 5G network construction has new requirements for optical modules. The 5G radio access network (RAN) is re-divided into active antenna unit (AAU), distributed unit DU), and centralized unit CU). In the base station on the wireless network side, the fronthaul optical module between AAU and DU will be upgraded from 10G to 25G, which newly increases the demand for intermediate transmission optical module between DU and CU. Assuming that one DU carries one base station, each base station is connected to 3 AAUs, and each AAU has a pair of transceiver interfaces, 5G fronthaul will bring at least 30 million scale requirements for 25G optical modules. The 5G network will be based on SA networking, and an independent 5G bearer network needs to be built. The 5G bearer network is divided into backbone network, provincial network and metropolitan area network. In the backhaul of the bearer network, the requirements of the metropolitan area network are upgraded from 10G/40G to 100G. The metropolitan area network can be further subdivided into the core layer, the convergence layer, and the access layer. The bearer networks of different levels are provided through different port rates. The middle backhaul services of different capabilities require middle backhaul optical modules of different speeds. The backbone network's demand for optical modules will be upgraded from 100G to 400G. The commercial use of 5G networks will drive the construction of large/ultra-large data centers around the world, which will further stimulate the market demand for optical modules. The large bandwidth, wide connections, and low latency of the 5G network will greatly increase the data communication volume and drive the development of downstream industries such as high-definition video, VR, and cloud computing, and put forward higher requirements for internal data transmission in the data center. Large-scale data center expansion, new construction, and network performance optimization will be further carried out. According to Cisco’s forecast, the global IDC market will continue to grow. By 2021, there will be 628 hyperscale data centers around the world, compared with 338 in 2016, an increase of nearly 1.9 times. Cisco predicts that the total amount of global cloud computing will grow from 3850EB in 2016 to 14078EB in 2021. The global data center enters the 400G era, requiring optical modules to develop towards high speed and long distance. The large-scale trend of data centers has led to an increase in transmission distance requirements. The transmission distance of multimode optical fiber is limited by the increase in signal rate, and it is expected to be gradually replaced by single-mode optical fiber. The construction of large-scale data centers will drive product upgrades in the optical module industry, and demand for the high-end optical module industry is expected to increase. The new flat data center has increased the demand for optical modules. The data center architecture has been transformed and upgraded from the traditional "three-layer convergence" to the "two-layer leaf-spine architecture", making the data center from the vertical (north-south) flow establishment to the horizontal (east-west direction) establishment to meet the east-west flow demand of the data center While accelerating the horizontal expansion within the data center. The number of optical modules under the traditional three-layer architecture is about 8.8 times the number of cabinets (8 40G optical modules, 0.8 100G optical modules), and the number of optical modules under the improved three-layer architecture is about 9.2 times the number of cabinets (8 40G optical modules). Module, 1.2 100G optical modules), the number of optical modules under the emerging two-layer architecture is about 44 or 48 times the number of cabinets (80-90% of which are 10G optical modules, equipped with 8 40G modules or 4 100G modules).
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