Huawei Launches the World's First Intelligent Optical Splitter for Reliable Optical Fiber Network Infrastructure

Huawei, the world's leading information and communications technology (ICT) solution provider, launched the industry's first intelligent optical splitter today on the FTTH Council Europe held in London. With this new optical splitter, operators can realize automatic identification and generation of the optical distribution network (ODN) topology for the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network and precise fault diagnosis in optical splitter branches. Compared with the traditional optical splitters for passive optical networks (PON), this new optical splitter is more advanced in technology and marks another major breakthrough in the domain of intelligent ODN.

The large-scale deployment of FTTH networks made it challenging for operators to manage huge quantities of optical fibers. During the construction phase, operators had to manually outline the network topology through reports, which was low in efficiency and real-time availability, and affected the accuracy of operations and maintenance (O&M). In addition, during the O&M phase, the OTDR-based fault responsibility definition/diagnosis solution detects faults according to the signal intervals returning from different branches, which fails when optical fiber branches are of the same length and even requires reverse fault diagnosis in households. Consequently, customer satisfaction is undermined due to the prolonged fault handling period and increased difficulties.

With the built-in optical domain identity and the advanced ID identification technology applied in the central office, the newly released intelligent splitter enables remote detection of optical splitter branches and automatic topology identification to greatly improve the management efficiency and quality of the optical fiber network. The intelligent optical splitter also implements fault alarming, diagnosis, and responsibility definition for each branch by leveraging a two-dimensional fault detecting system featuring optical domain identity and OTDR-based signal interval feedback, which significantly enhances O&M efficiency. The newly added intelligent optical splitter to the iODN solution truly realizes intelligent intensive management of optical fibers in FTTH networks.

"Huawei's continuous investment in the research and development of fiber infrastructure and its release of the intelligent optical splitter focus on customer needs and help customers achieve business success by constructing intelligent optical fiber infrastructure that can be identified, perceived, and monitored," said Wang Dexiang, director of Fiber Infrastructure Business Unit at Huawei.

Huawei has long been dedicated to providing customers with top-quality optical fiber network infrastructure solutions. In October 2010, Huawei launched the industry's first iODN solution and won the InfoVision Award on the Broadband World Forum (BBWF). Relevant iODN standards initiated by Huawei were also published by ITU-T. Huawei has already deployed more than 60 iODN networks worldwide.