Huawei today held its Global Optical Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Run under the theme: "F5G-A (F5G Advanced), the Foundation for Industrial Intelligence", the summit attracted more than 300 industry customers and partners from South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and other countries. The summit also saw Huawei release a series of F5G-A products and solutions for sub-Saharan Africa and launch the OptiX Club member recruitment event in the region to drive local industry intelligence.

As optical technologies evolve, their contribution to intelligent transformation in various fields only becomes more important.

"As a leader in the optical industry, Huawei is committed to working with partners and customers to promote enterprises' digital and intelligent transformation to every corner in sub-Saharan Africa," Li Chen, Vice-President of the sub-Saharan region of Huawei, noted in his opening speech.

In a keynote speech titled: "F5G-A, the Foundation for Industrial Intelligence", Gavin Gu, President of Huawei's Enterprise Optical Network Domain, pointed out: "Industrial intelligence brings three new trends to the optical industry. F5G-A shows us a clear technology evolution roadmap for these trends. I believe that with the joint efforts of customers, partners and Huawei, we will achieve win-win co-operation in industrial intelligence."

For medium- and large-sized campuses in education, healthcare, hospitality and manufacturing industries, Huawei launched the next-generation FTTO 2.0 Solution, in which Huawei uses XGS-PON Pro and WiFi 7 technologies to upgrade bandwidth, networking, experience and O&M, achieving 12.5/25G to rooms and 2.5/10G to APs and desks to build a green 10Gbps all-optical campus.

For energy and transportation production networks, Huawei launched Huawei OptiXtrans E6600, the industry's first optical transmission product that supports the fine grain OTN (fgOTN) standard, to help customers build highly reliable communication networks in the intelligent era. At the summit, Huawei also released the fgOTN technical white paper that provides a detailed description on the fgOTN standard series, key technologies and application scenarios, proposes the industry target network architecture based on the fgOTN standards and describes the prospect of future optical communication applications in a range of industries.

In addition, for data centre interconnect (DCI) scenarios in the intelligent era, Huawei launched next-generation DCI platform Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 Pro that supports Tbps per wavelength to ensure efficient, highly secure and highly reliable transmission of services between data centres.

At the summit, multiple customer representatives from sub-Saharan Africa delivered speeches and shared their stories about their co-operation with Huawei in all-optical network construction in the region.

"Digital transformation is an inevitable trend to improve port operations efficiency and expand business models," said one such customer, Dr Sudi Mwasinago, Operation General Manager of Kenya Ports Authority (KPA). "KPA works with Huawei to build a smart, green, efficient and secure POL port network, which can satisfy service development requirements in the next decade."

Railway perimeters are the first safety barrier in isolating the operating area of a train from its surroundings. Here, Huawei technology is improving operations for Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA).

"Huawei's optical-visual linkage solution provides a new direction for railway perimeter security through both optical and visual verification," said Athanacious Makgamatha, General Manager of Signaling and Telecoms Dept, PRASA. "PRASA hopes to carry out more joint innovations with Huawei to promote intelligent railway development."

Optical technologies are having a similarly profound impact on the power sector.

"The electric power industry is rapidly evolving. In addition to future network development, existing services must also be considered," said Kgomotso Setlhapelo, Chief Engineer: Telecommunications, National Transmission Company of South Africa (NTCSA), Eskom. "Huawei MS-OTN devices provide ultra-high bandwidth of over 100Gbit/s to support future services. In addition, they are compatible with SDH hard pipes and MPLS-TP technologies to guarantee network reliability and flexibility."

Finally, Gavin Chen, Vice-President of Enterprise Network Marketing & Solution Sales Dept, Optical Domain, Huawei, announced the initiation of the OptiX Club member recruitment event. By building industry technical communities, Huawei aims to promote regional industry data intelligence.

For more information about Huawei optical products and solutions, visit https://e.huawei.com/en/solutions/enterprise-optical-network.