5G vs. FTTx: Friends Or Foes?

Posted by v-solution on March 13th, 2020

Back in February 2017, when Samsung showcased its fixed 5G products at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the vision of delivering home internet service with 5G technology was ignited. before that, in 2016, when AT&T was doing an attempt using its 5G network, fixed wireless 5G technology enabling home broadband access was proposed. it had been indeed an appealing solution to customers, particularly in regions where deploying new fibre infrastructure for FTTH are often expensive.

So, what's the connection between 5G and FTTx, in terms of technology and end-market application? Will wireless and wireline networks, the 2 essential channels of internet access, converge into one single network with the arrival and adoption of 5G? We delved into these questions, with China, the market that built over 40% of all the 4G base stations worldwide and bought over 75% of all GPON & EPON equipment globally, because the case in point.

Fundamentally, wireless communication, either 3G or 4G, is about maximising utilisation of limited radio channel bandwidth to attach as many user devices as is possible to the air interface. A typical 4G LTE base station, consisting of antenna, RRU and BBU, connects downwards to mobile phones, and upwards to IP transport equipment like PTN.

Compared to LTE, 5G enhances the info rate between the air interface and therefore the user equipment by exploring a replacement territory of frequency for higher channel bandwidth, with 3.5GHz and millimetre wave being used; employing even more antennas than in 4G for enormous MIMO; adopting higher order modulation and better coding schemes and using more advanced multi-access technologies than OFDM, which is employed in LTE. With higher-than-3.5GHz channels being exploited, base stations coverage will inevitably shrink, and it'll cause a minimum of two or 3 times higher density of base station deployment than in 4G.

In fact, coverage of 4G LTE has already been relatively sufficient in China.

As of 2017, the supply of 4G LTE is 73.83%, ranking within the highest 20 nations/regions worldwide. On the opposite hand, FTTH has covered quite 90% of urban and 30% of suburban households. the supply of both wireless and FTTx infrastructures in China makes it an honest marketplace for access networks, but economically, it doesn't add up to render obsolete the already existing FTTx infrastructure and use 5G to deliver home broadband service instead.

Since the rollout of the “Broadband China” initiatives in 2013, EPON and GPON became widely available across China. 10G PON emerged in 2015, when China Telecom upgraded its legacy EPON system to 10G EPON OLT in tier-1 metropolis areas including Shanghai. From the speed of connectivity perspective, the info rate that an user experiences with 10G PON OLT is analogous thereto of 5G wireless.

However, deem example XGSPON. it's an optical split ratio of 1:128; 25% over-subscription; 92% bandwidth efficiency and a downstream rate of up to 286 Mbps compared to the standard 5G download speed of over 100 Mbps, assuming downstream capacity of the bottom stations is 20 Gbps. Therefore, a minimum of within the short term it's unlikely that 5G are going to be far more superior thereto of 10G PON in terms of the end-user rate .

In addition, 5G won’t be widely deployed until 2020, consistent with China Mobile, one among the pioneers within the