According to a new GSMA study, the number of 5G connections globally will reach 1.3 billion by 2025, covering 40 percent of the world's population. And the number of 5G connections will reach 1.4 billion by 2025. 5G will bring key growth opportunities for immersive personal services such as VR, AR, and live streaming. It will revitalize the enterprise market and power new business models for fields like vehicles, drones, and smart manufacturing.

Today, more than 967 million households have broadband access, and 286 operators in 49 countries provide gigabit broadband services. What's more, the emergence of smart home appliances and related services will promote new business models centered on homes. The fast development of innovative 2C, 2B, and 2H services will drive the CT industry to enter a new development era. However, existing optical networks are unable to support the fast growth of these services and severely hamper the business growth of operators.

Development of Bandwidth-Driven Transport Networks Faces Severe Challenges In the 2C field, due to unlimited data plans becoming more common, operators are finding that revenue is not increasing at the same rate as data usage. In the 2B field, operators face increasing challenges from cloud service providers (CSPs). Specifically, in addition to being unable to match the flexible provisioning of enterprise services and on-demand services offered by CSPs, operators cannot make the most of their advantages in network connections, and the strategic market of enterprise digitalization is shrinking. In the 2H field, bandwidth is increasing, but user experience is not improving. As a result, end users are not interested in the emerging services of operators. The bandwidth-driven business model can no longer support the business growth of operators. On the contrary, it exacerbates problems, such as the lack of optical fiber and equipment room resources. Meanwhile, service diversity makes networks more complex, which in turn increases network O&M costs. This leads to OPEX accounting for 70% (and rising) of the TCO for a large number of operators.

In terms of transport network development, the development model of the industry is facing a bottleneck. In the past 10 years, operators have upgraded their basic transport networks from copper to all-fiber, solving the problem of limited network capacity. Deploying fiber optics access networks for broadband Internet access and WDM in transmission networks for large-capacity service transmission has enabled operators to increase network bandwidth from 512 kb/s to 10 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s, and even 1 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s. After moving to all-fiber networks, optical transport network evolution will be achieved by progressively ramping up the single-carrier rate from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s, 100 Gb/s, and 200/400 Gb/s. However, Shannon's theorem states that channel capacity (single-carrier rate) is limited by channel SNR (transmission distance) and channel bandwidth (effective spectral width). Thus, the single-carrier rate cannot be increased indefinitely. By increasing the optical network's single-carrier transmission rate beyond 200/400 Gb/s, the Shannon limit is quickly approached. And at 200/400 Gb/s, balancing transmission rate and transmission distance becomes extremely challenging. For optical access networks, the uplink and downlink rate of home networks are improving, from EPON/GPON, 10G EPON/10G GPON, XGS-PON. While focusing on improving bandwidth in the optical access network domain, operators failed to ensure end-to-end service quality. The root cause is that such a bandwidth-driven development model of transport networks can no longer support the business growth of operators.