Wei Leping, the executive deputy director of the Communications and Technology Commission of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at the China optical network symposium that, 5G will bring more opportunities to photo-communications, and the optical fiber, optical modules and high-speed optical access network systems will be the three major beneficiaries. Currently, considered as current 3.5GHz frequency band, due to the higher frequency band and poor coverage, compared with 1.8GHz, 14dB is less. And the number of base station will be expanded as two times. With the application of millimeter wave, the number of base station will be increased greatly. However, current density of the 4G base stations in China is quite high, and the distance between the urban base stations has reached 200-500m, the number of base stations in 5G era will be increased hardly.

The number of base stations cannot be greatly increased, and the amount of optical fiber will increase accordingly, which is expected to be twice as much as 4G. According to Wei Leping’s estimation, there is expected to be at least several hundred million core kilometers of space. Considering with the possible existing non-technological and non-rational competitive trend in China, the huge demand to optical fiber exceeding the market expectation will be caused. Namely that, the large increase to 5G base stations in future will make the optical fiber to be the first beneficiary.

Therewith, the optical modules will be the second beneficiary, and it is expected that the entire 5G network brings in tens of millions of doses of 25/50 Gbps high-speed optical modules. Moreover, due to the huge development space of data center in China, the development space to high-speed optical module will be considerable.

The huge capacity and new framework of 5G will also bring new development opportunities but with cost pressures to the carrier network, making the high-speed optical access network system the third beneficiary. The new 5G framework will expand the return transmission capacity by dozens of times to more than 100Gbps, which requires the introduction of 25/50gbps based WDM, SPN, WDM PON, etc. The market will generate huge demand for tunable lasers, high-speed optical modules and WDM.

Detailed information refers to: http://fiber.ofweek.com/2018-06/ART-210001-8420-30240335.html