South Africa’s Rain announced that it has cooperated with Huawei to build a 5G transport network using Huawei’s optical cross-connect (OXC) and 200G solution.
Rain is focused on bringing mobile broadband (MBB) networks to South Africa and becoming the first operator to deploy 5G networks in South Africa.
The traditional ROADM mode requires a higher footprint, extra subracks (one for each new transmission direction), site visits, and manual fiber connection, resulting in low O&M efficiency. These factors underline Rain’s motivation to use Huawei’s OXC and 200G solution for the construction of their 5G transport network.
Rain applies OXC technology at core nodes. Huawei’s OXC uses highly reliable and low-insertion-loss optical backplane technologies to merge the independent boards originally found in ROADM sites, reducing footprint by 80%. The reduced footprint is even more significant when there are more transmission directions.
At the electrical layer, comparing with 100G solution, Huawei’s 200G solution improves the fiber capacity and reduces the E2E per bit cost. This solution features high integration, uses less power, and delivers high performance. The entire network requires no regeneration boards, greatly reducing the per wavelength cost.
Richard Jin, President of Huawei's Transmission and Access Network Product Line
This is a milestone in the global use of our OXC+200G solution. This transport network can meet the requirements of the next decade, realize higher network O&M efficiency, and provide an unrivaled user experience.
