Since 2019, operators in China, the United States, Japan, and Korea have been rushing to open 5G commercial age. For the future application of 5G, bearer network construction plays a particularly important role. As one of the leading manufacturers, FiberHome has been at the forefront of the industry in promoting 5G development and made important contributions to the 5G bearer network standard.

5G is divided into two different networking modes: independent networking (SA) and non-independent networking (NSA). At the "China Telecom 5G Innovation Cooperation Conference" held in Shenzhen, Wei Leping, director of the Science and Technology Committee of China Telecom Group Corporation, said 11 operators in the United States, South Korea and other countries have launched 5G commercial services based on NSA. 5G is not a 100-meter race. It is necessary to get rid of the follow-up mode and adhere to a high quality development. He believes that adhering to the NSA/SA hybrid network model based on the SA of 5G core network (5GC) + NR is the correct path to achieve 5G network deployment.

Then, do different networking methods impose different requirements on the bearer network? From FiberHome’s perspective, the main difference between the SA and the NSA network is that the anchors of the services are different, but there is no essential difference in the service bandwidth, delay requirements, and dynamic requirements that affect the planning of the bearer network. Therefore, the 5G bearer network design will not have a fundamental difference between SA and NSA, but for the NSA network, more consideration should be given to the integration with the original 3G/4G bearer network.

As we all know, the smooth progress of 5G bearer network requires standardization organizations to establish standards. ITU-T, IEEE, IETF, OIF, CPRI, CCSA and other major international and domestic standardization organizations have intensively carried out 5G bearer standardization research work. “Reducing the standardization work gap” has also become the theme of “World Telecommunication Day 2019”. In addition, at the ITU-T Q11/15 intermediate meeting held in Xi'an, important progress was made in the formulation of 5G bearer standards.

At present, domestic operators have made many positive contributions to the 5G bearer standardization. China Telecom and China Mobile have promoted the M-OTN and SPN projects respectively. The official names are G.709.25-50 (25G and 50G OTN interfaces) and G.mtn (Interfaces for a metro transport network). FiberHome has always been an important participant in the 5G bearer standardization, actively participating in the review and coordination of the above 5G bearer new standards, and has submitted 118 standard proposals so far, including 56 first authors.

The pace of 5G promotion is getting faster and faster, and the major three telecom operators, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, have launched large-scale deployment since Oct. 2019. During the mature process of 5G bearer technology, operators will face difficulties in upgrading the original network to support enhanced Layer 3 functions such as SR and EVPN. The capacity is not enough and improved by 5 to 10 times to meet the challenges of 5G demand. It is necessary to build a new 5G bearer network as soon as possible. In the future, FiberHome will continue to cooperate with domestic operators in various sub-technical fields such as IPRAN and SPN to help the deployment of 5G in China.