operators are focusing on the construction of 5G base stations, and the demand for optical module continues to expand. In 2019, more than 130,000 5G base stations have been built in my country. 2020 is the first year of large-scale construction of 5G base stations, mainly covering urban areas. In 2020, the 5G network construction will focus on SA networking, and the commercial value will be higher. During the 2020 two sessions, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that my country has added more than 10,000 new base stations every week. According to the operator's investment plan, the three major operators will build 700,000 base stations in September 2020, but construction will not stop from September to December. As a new entrant, China Radio and Television shared and jointly built a 700MHZ 5G base station prequel and mid-return transmission with China Mobile is expected to further expand capacity.
optical module is the basic component of the physical layer of 5G network and is widely used in wireless and transmission equipment. 5G network mainly consists of three main parts, namely wireless network, bearer network, and core network. The proportion of its cost in system equipment continues to increase, and even exceeds 50-70% of some equipment, which is a key factor in 5G's low cost and wide coverage. Compared with the new requirements put forward by 4G for optical modules. 5G wireless access network (RAN) is re-divided into active antenna unit (AAU), distribution unit DU, and centralized unit CU). In the base station on the wireless network side, the front optical module between the AAU and the DU will be upgraded from 10G to 25G, adding the new demand for the mid-transmission optical module between the DU and the CU. Suppose a DU carries a base station, each base station is connected to 3 AAUs, and each AAU has a pair of transceiver interfaces, and 5G fronthaul will bring at least 30 million scale demands to the 25G optical module. The
5G network will be mainly composed of SA networking, and an independent 5G bearer network is needed. 5G bearer network is divided into backbone network, provincial network and metropolitan area network. In the backhaul of the bearer network, the requirements of metropolitan area network are upgraded from 10G/40G to 100G. The metropolitan area network can be further subdivided into the core layer, the aggregation layer, and the access layer. The bearer networks at different levels provide different capabilities of mid-backhaul services through different port rates, requiring mid-backhaul optical modules of different rates. The backbone network's demand for optical modules will be upgraded from 100G to 400G. The commercial use of
5G network will drive the construction of large/super-large data centers around the world and further drive the market demand for optical modules. The large bandwidth, wide connection and low latency of 5G networks will greatly increase data traffic, and drive the development of downstream industries such as high-definition video, VR, and cloud computing, and put forward higher requirements for internal data transmission in the data center. The expansion, new construction and optimization of network performance of large data centers will be further carried out.
According to Cisco's forecast, the global IDC market size will continue to grow, and by 2021, there will be 628 hyper-large data centers worldwide, an increase of nearly 1.9 times compared with 338 in 2016. Cisco predicts that the global total amount of cloud computing will grow from 3850EB in 2016 to 14078EB in 2021.
