Viewpoint
At the 10th Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF) 2024, the Autonomous Driving Networks (ADN) Summit was held under the theme of “Advancing Toward AN L4: Empowering Superior UBB Operations.” At the forum, Yue Wei, President of Huawei’s NCE Optical Network Domain, delivered a keynote speech titled “Intelligence Empowers F5.5G Premium All-Optical Network.” In the speech, he shared how innovative practices of Huawei’s F5.5G premium all-optical network solution, guided by “Network Aware User” and “User Aware Network”, is steering carriers towards ADN L4 and ushering in a new era of experience-driven operations.
Yue Wei, President of Huawei’s NCE Optical Network Domain
With the advent of the “experience first” era, optical network O&M is evolving towards the user experience-centric mode. In home broadband scenarios, O&M is still driven by user complaints and rely on a large amount of manpower for passive rectification, resulting in high investment and low satisfaction. For example, a provincial company in China needs over 4,500 engineers to manage more than 16,000 complaints related to home broadband services from 19 million subscribers every day. Despite such a huge investment, the subscriber churn rate remains over 10%. Similarly, in optical transmission scenarios, potential risks such as fiber, cable, and node sharing cannot be proactively identified, resulting in 40% of trouble tickets and at least 4 hours of troubleshooting. It is arguably impossible for any users to accept such long service interruption caused by the inefficient processing mode.
To address these issues, Huawei’s premium all-optical network solution introduces a “twin-turbo” methodology combining “Network Aware User” and “User Aware Network” to improve user experience and O&M efficiency. Specifically, “Network awareness user” refers to proactive experience assurance that helps prevent user complaints and “User awareness network” refers to automatic fault diagnosis and efficient complaint handling. The solution will bring revolutionary value improvement to carriers through both premium broadband and premium transmission scenarios.
Value Leap of Premium Broadband
In terms of “Network Aware User”, the innovative home broadband Customer Experience Index (CEI) model is constructed by leveraging the BLOA algorithm based on big data across three layers and from eight dimensions. It can accurately measure the actual user experience and present the results in the form of CEI scores. After obtaining global user experience data, the proactive assurance agent can proactively take specific actions and provide targeted service marketing. It identifies low-scoring subscribers and resolves network issues before faults are reported, reducing complaints by 60% and laying a solid foundation for user satisfaction and loyalty.
In terms of “User Aware Network”, the fault diagnosis copilot, leveraging global expertise, can automatically resolve more than 34 common faults in an E2E manner within 60 seconds for call centers, reducing home visits by 30%. Additionally, the HomeCare app helps frontline engineers query information about more than 30 fault scenarios without NOC support, reducing on-site troubleshooting duration from 1 hour to 10 minutes. With the support of remote automatic closed-loop and efficiency improvement of onsite diagnosis, the O&M and response efficiency in home broadband scenarios will be greatly improved.
Efficiency Boost of Premium Transmission
From the perspective of “Network Aware User”, the proactive assurance agent in the transmission domain implements proactive awareness of network and SLA risks based on digital twin technology, helping to accurately display fault locations and facilitate fault rectification. Through proactive awareness, demarcation, locating, and rectification, the agent can reduce trouble tickets by 40% and effectively ensure user SLA.
From the perspective of “User Aware Network”, the innovative optical-electrical collaboration algorithm is used to associate alarms across different layers. This enables the system to automatically aggregate more than 90% of alarms and locate the root causes, achieving “one ticket for one fault”. In addition, the fault diagnosis copilot can work with Huawei’s OMD and eOTDR hardware to locate fiber faults with meter-level precision. With the preceding technologies, the fault locating duration is reduced from 4 hours to 15 minutes, and the number of troubleshooting teams required for a single fault is reduced from 3 to 1.
Yue Wei noted that the proactive assurance agent implementing “Network Aware User” and the fault diagnosis copilot enhancing “User Aware Network” are expected to further improve customer value throughout the lifecycle of the premium broadband “A-PRIME” and premium transmission “T-AUTO” scenarios. Looking ahead, the intelligent F5.5G premium all-optical network will guide carriers towards ADN L4, ushering in a new era of experience-driven operations.
