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At present, 5g network is in full swing. The three operators have formulated considerable 5g construction investment plans. How much will the optical fiber and optical cable industry benefit from 5g construction? On November 18-20, the 2019 global optical fiber and cable conference co sponsored by APC Association and Hengtong group was held. He Guili, vice president of China Institute of information and communication, attended the conference and gave a keynote speech. He believed that 5g network construction would have a positive impact on the optical fiber and cable market, and the specific needs were reflected in three aspects.

5g base station will give birth to the demand for optical fiber and cable scale

The 5g base station will use the udn networking mode of "macro base station + small base station" to achieve basic coverage. Since 5g base stations use intermediate frequency and high frequency resources, the coverage area of a single station becomes smaller and the number of base stations increases compared with 4G. Specifically, he Guili estimates that the number of 5g macro base stations is more than twice that of 4G base stations, and the number of small base stations is 2-3 times that of 4G macro base stations. "The multiplication of the number of base stations will give birth to a large demand for optical fiber and cable resources in 5g bearer networks." He Guili's judgment. In addition, 5g udn networking also puts forward new requirements for distribution optical cable, remote optical cable and photoelectric hybrid cable. Different schemes and modes of front transmission network also have different requirements for optical cable consumption.

5g promotes further development of data center

He Guili believes that the characteristics of 5g high bandwidth and wide connection will drive the explosive growth of data processing capacity, put forward higher requirements for the construction of data center, promote the deployment of larger data center, and make the data connection move from 100g to 400g. At present, the pre research work of 800g has also been started. In addition, the application of 5g low delay promotes the data center to sink to the edge and drives the development of the edge data center. The development of the above data centers provides a good development opportunity for optical fiber and optical cable: high density optical cable for connection between data centers has become a trend, and high bandwidth and short wavelength division multiplexing multimode optical fiber will also be widely used.

5g will promote the upgrading of backbone network and submarine optical cable

In the 5g era, the substantial increase in the demand for carrying bandwidth, the flattening of the network, and the interconnection of large central computer rooms and data centers will pose great challenges to the backbone network. At present, the 100g backbone network has been stretched and is evolving to 200g / 400g / 600g. It is expected that the single wave 1t equipment will be mature in 2021. In terms of submarine cables, China's Internet international export bandwidth is growing at an average annual rate of 21%, and it is planned to reach 20tbps by 2020; One belt, one road, has proposed to position submarine optical cable network as an important development direction, and relevant countries have introduced policies to attract submarine optical cable to land. "The construction and upgrading of backbone networks and submarine optical cables put forward the demand for ultra-low loss optical fibers and large effective area optical fibers. Optical fibers supporting space division multiplexing technology such as multi-core optical fibers and few mode optical fibers are the hot research direction to solve the bottleneck problem of optical fiber bandwidth in the future." He Guili said.