Telefónica, the largest telecom company in Spain, has rich network resources and a giant customer base that spans the globe. As one of the world's largest fixed and mobile telecom companies, Telefónica continues to expand its global network deployment and global services, with a total of 357 million customers and a series of brands, including Movistar in Spain and Latin America, O2 in Europe, and Vivo in Brazil.
Against the backdrop of industrial digitalization, networks need to be built first. Operators need to build reliable network infrastructure to cater to new service development requirements such as data and service migration to the cloud, all-in-one smart home, 4K/8K video, and immersive VR games. What are the challenges in metro transport network construction? And what are Telefónica's considerations about metro network? Recently, Juan Pedro Fernandez Palacios, Head of Unit Transport Networks, Telefónica CTIO shared his opinions about these questions with us in our interview at the NGON & 5G Transport forum. Watch the interview below:
"As one of the leading telecom operators in the world, Telefónica has consistently introduced innovative technologies, built high-quality network infrastructure, led the development of digital services, and offered premium network connection services to meet the customer requirements of digital transformation", said Juan when talking about the role played by Telefónica in helping customers with their digital transformation.
What kind of challenges will we face during the construction of high-quality metro optical networks amid increasing FTTH home broadband and 5G services? Juan explained the issue from two perspectives:
First, amid uncertain service development and traffic growth, the key lies in minimizing the cost of network construction and achieving cost effectiveness. While offering users premium and low-price services, we also need to leave some margins for the network bandwidth to deal withpossible newservices in the future.
Juan explained that Telefónica is dedicated to network innovation, and is willing to introduce new technologies to maximize the value of optical transport network infrastructure. By doing so, Telefónica can build a solid network foundation for future industrial digital transformation with the optimal TCO.
Second, future network construction requires end-to-end intelligent management that automatically allocates network resources and automatic service provisioning during network planning, management, and control, thereby building automatic intelligent network and significantly improving network efficiency.
To proactively address the above challenges and meet diverse requirements of future network construction, how can Telefónica build a leading metro optical transport network? Juan said, "First, we need the intensive use of DWDM technologies and extend them to the entire metro network to build an all-optical 'one-hop connection' architecture. By minimizing the number of hops to greatly reduce network latency, we can offer customers better experience."
"Second, we need to extend the all-optical switching ROADM technology from core nodes to the edge, as well as build a highly-scalable network-wide ROADM architecture to reduce the complexity of network expansion and shorten the TTM of services, and in doing so deal with uncertain service traffic growth with certain agile networks."
At MWC 2023, Huawei launched the latest OptiX Alps-WDM. As the solution is a good match for Telefónica's strategic vision about optical transport networks, Telefónica took the initiative to test the solution, and released key test results at NGON 2023 in mid-May. The solution uses multi-ring networking topologies, and selects HL4 site as the aggregation node, HL5 site as the access node. The test has verified automation functions such as device go-online, service deployment and O&M, and pooling functions of MxN WSS at the aggregation node. These features and capabilities will bring huge benefits to metro WDM network construction.
Juan Pedro Fernandez Palacios delivering speech at NGON 2023
First, the network-wide OXC/ROADM architecture and pooling function enable one-hop connection of networks and eliminate the waste of wavelength resources. These can provide ultimate experiences for users on the premise of efficient network construction, and dramatically reduce the cost of network construction, helping Telefónica build a solid network foundation for future industrial digital transformation with lower TCO.
Second, "one-click automation" enables service planning, deployment, and automatic optimization, thereby greatly simplifying service provisioning and maintenance and shortening the TTM of services. These can help Telefónica simplify O&M and reduce the labor cost and other cost generated from service maintenance, contributing to the construction of a metro target network with optimal TCO.
As such, Huawei OptiX Alps-WDM matches Telefónica's strategic needs, and can help Telefónica build premium network infrastructure, lead the development of digital services, and provide high-quality network connection services in response to customers' digital transformation requirements.
