In December 2019, the European Commission presented the European Green Deal with the ambition of making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, boosting the economy, improving people's health and quality of life, caring for nature, and leaving no one behind.

More and more, fibre connectivity is recognised as a key asset to align the digital and sustainability agendas. Being the most sustainable telecommunication infrastructure technology, full-fibre is a prerequisite to achieving the European Green Deal and making the European Union’s economy more sustainable.

As a result, the need to work collectively towards a more sustainable society has become a strategic objective not only for policy makers but for the vast majority of private organisations, part of the FTTH value chain.

 

Green Home Solution for Sustainability Targets

Member company: Huawei
Country or geographical scope: Global
Company type: Vendor/Reseller
Product/service category involved: ONT for FTTX

Abstract

Copper Migration to FTTx is already the consensus of telecom industry, now as the latest solution, FTTR (Fiber To The Room) extends the fiber to each room and allows users to enjoy stable gigabit connections and seamless roaming throughout the house, furthermore, it can also bring significant power saving and emission reduction value to the end users, indirectly to the operator, we call it green home solution. Based on Huawei practice, we found out each FTTR ONT uses only 0.37 kWh per day and saves 38.5 kWh every year comparing to traditional ONT plus repeaters, that is, the green and environment-friendly design enables users to enjoy better network experience with 20% less power consumption. In 2020, Huawei FTTR ONTs (OptiXstar series) are in service in more than 40 million households worldwide, saving over 1.5 billion kWh of electricity and reducing CO2 emissions by more than 730,000 tons, equivalent to planting more than 30 million trees.


Context

High-speed broadband service applications continue to emerge, and innovative services such as ultra-high-definition online video, online education, and telecommuting place higher and higher requirements on network bandwidth, latency, and jitter, driving users' demand for broadband packages to move upward,and further lead to the accelerated development of fiber-optic broadband networks. However, a large-scale survey found that limited by the network defects of the home information network, the high-bandwidth package service capabilities provided by the operators have not been fully utilized, and there is a situation of "1000MB home access is easy, but 100MB room access is difficult".

Solutions

In order to solve the problem of home network, the industry has proposed a new generation of home networking technology based on optical fiber - FTTR (Fiber to the Room). The FTTR all-optical Wi-Fi solution directly extends the optical fiber to each room, which can achieve more than gigabit coverage in the whole house. It is the key to building a high-quality home information infrastructure and indicates the development direction of gigabit home networking.

Results

Compared to conventional fixed broadband access technologies, full-fiber-based FTTR internet access is based on the innovative technologies that enable consume less energy and reduce the dependence on non-renewable resources like copper to achieve the reduction of carbon footprint target. Based on the passive nature of PON network architecture, fiber-based network enables to save energy consumption up to 30% than the traditional copper-based network cable. In addition, because of physical features of fiber cable, such as more durable and less susceptible to harsh environmental conditions as well as lightweight and compact in size (the size of fiber cable is only 15% of traditional copper cable), there is no need to replace the existing indoor optical fiber cable when upgrading the network. A full-fiber network can save mineral resource use and waste, reducing climate and environmental risks.

Last but not least, with FTTR, the master optical modem of each line integrates the functions of optical modem and WIFI router to reduce the number of electronic devices in use whilst saving energy consumption by 50%. The annual energy consumption saving of a typical master optical modem can reach 105 KWh per year. In addition, the power consumption of panel type slave modem is also ultra-low, barely 1 KWh of electricity for 5 days. Each slave modem can save 38 KWh per year, reducing 30% of power consumption than traditional modem.

Conclusions

Copper Migration to FTTx is already the consensus of telecom industry, now as the latest solution, FTTR (Fiber To The Room) extends the fiber to each room and allows users to enjoy stable gigabit connections and seamless roaming throughout the house, furthermore, it can also bring significant power saving and emission reduction value to the end users, indirectly to the operator, we call it green home solution. Based on Huawei practice, we found out each FTTR ONT uses only 0.37 kWh per day and saves 38.5 kWh every year comparing to traditional ONT plus repeaters, that is, the green and environment-friendly design enables users to enjoy better network experience with 20% less power consumption. In 2020, Huawei FTTR ONTs (OptiXstar series) are in service in more than 40 million households worldwide, saving over 1.5 billion kWh of electricity and reducing CO2 emissions by more than 730,000 tons, equivalent to planting more than 30 million trees.

Further reading 

Huawei OptiXstar ONT and FTTR Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FVc9RvwtMk

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