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FEATURE MOBILE FRONTHAUL
NGPON2 to the cell site, rather than sharing that wavelength with other services. Te CPRI protocol has been defined with six speeds, including one that closely matches the 10Gb/s data rate of NGPON2 optics. Lively believes there’s a second option: ‘Te
optional support for point-to-point wavelengths in NG-PON2, through the 48-channel WDM-PON overlay, provides an alternative means for small cell transport. Te support for large numbers of dedicated 1G/10G wavelengths in WDM-PON makes it a much better solution for fronthaul compared to TWDM,’ he claimed. Whichever approach is taken, Lively
believes that fixed and mobile access networks will eventually merge. ‘In a 5-10 year time frame I can see a situation where optical fronthaul as a standalone application goes away. I’m not predicting that’s going to happen but things are going that way.’
Intense competition Another point on which to speculate is which optical transceiver vendors will benefit from the fronthaul opportunity. Vendors who have
already established themselves in this new market include (in alphabetical order): Accelink Technologies, Avago, Eoptolink, Finisar, HiSense Broadband, HG Genuine Optics (HGG), InnoLight, OE Solutions and Source Photonics, according to LightCounting’s analysis. Te Chinese vendors are ones to watch,
according to Daryl Inniss, practice leader for components at market research firm Ovum. He highlights the massive fibre to the home build-out in China, which has delivered ‘a robust ecosystem developed to support the deployment of tens of millions of singlemode transceivers annually’ while also generating double-digit annual price reductions on singlemode transceivers. Inniss explained: ‘China’s huge passive
optical network build-out peaked in 2012. Tere are no other economies as large as China to support the volumes experienced during the build-out, so vendors that supplied deployments in China are seeking new opportunities’. Competition will be fierce, as always. With a market based on commodity parts, transceiver
vendors are also at risk of falling into a price war like the one that has sucked the profit out of the FTTx market, Lively warned. Transceiver suppliers will also need to be
nimble to capitalize on this constantly evolving market, he stated. Over the next five years the share of fronthaul networks using WDM will grow, and accordingly mobile operators will purchase more coloured optics. At the same time, the product mix will gradually shiſt to higher speeds, some exceeding 10 Gb/s as operators continue to add capacity. Looking further ahead, new types of
outdoor-hardened, colourless transceivers are being investigated for fronthaul applications in converged access networks. A number of options are on the table, including tunable lasers and remote pumping with a broad- wavelength light source, but the jury is still out on the best approach and there’s plenty of development work to be done. Te good news is that this could provide the much-needed opportunity for transceiver vendors to differentiate their products in the marketplace.l
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