A new highland for the development of the communication cable industry

The “14th Five-Year Plan” is a window period for the development of China’s manufacturing industry. The traditional manufacturing industry is facing new development opportunities and challenges. How to establish a new starting point for the communication optical cable industry to achieve high-quality development is a common discussion among all enterprises and scholars in the industry. important issues. Recently, the 3rd China Communication Optical Cable Academic Conference and Expert Joint Meeting was held in Weihai, Shandong. Experts from the industry gathered together to discuss industry development issues such as industrial upgrading and technological upgrading at important points in the five-year plan. Industry technologists point the way forward.

Focus on the main line of national development and grasp the development opportunities of the industry

Against the background of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and in-depth development of industrial transformation, the state has proposed the “East Counting West Counting” project and the strategic goal of “marine power” to vigorously promote the construction of a national integrated big data center system. Among them, computing power, as the core productive force of the development of the digital economy, is like water conservancy in the agricultural era and electricity in the industrial era. It is an indispensable and important infrastructure for implementing the strategy of manufacturing a powerful country. Due to the advantages of ultra-large capacity, ultra-long distance, high-quality, high-security, and low-latency, optical networks have gradually entered the public’s field of vision, providing ubiquitous computing resources with a wide coverage, flexible and efficient ultra-strong and high-quality capacity guarantee, Build an all-optical computing power network. As the nerve of the digital economy and society, the development of optical networks will bring huge new opportunities to the optical communication cable industry.

Key products and technological progress to meet new development needs

1. Optical fiber and related technological breakthroughs

The optical network in the new era has gradually entered the super 100G era. The next-generation backbone network optical fiber will not only serve 400G, but also serve higher-speed systems. The optical fiber has a large capacity, strong computing power, and high bandwidth. To meet the requirements of a long life cycle of 15 to 20 years for optical fiber networks, methods such as increasing the number of optical fibers (that is, the number of cores) in communication lines and developing new products can be used to increase line transmission capacity.

At present, China Unicom and the industry chain are actively promoting the introduction of optical fibers with large effective area and low loss characteristics (G.654.E) in the land transmission system, and carry out the standardization, industrialization and test demonstration of G.654.E optical fibers. Compared with G.652.D optical fiber, G.654.E optical fiber has the characteristics of ultra-low loss and low nonlinearity. It is the best choice for 400G transmission system. It has better performance in large-capacity and ultra-long-distance land and ocean fields Application prospects. The application and deployment of G.654.E optical fiber in the optical network is conducive to the construction of an ultra-high-speed, ultra-long-distance, and large-capacity backbone optical network, and serves the implementation of the national strategy of “counting from east to west”. While deploying G.654.E fiber on a large scale, consider further optimization to reduce its attenuation in the 1612-1625nm wavelength range, and conduct in-depth research on the preparation process of the raw material fluorine-doped sleeve.

In addition, the research and development of miniaturized optical fiber and hollow-core optical fiber also provides a new solution for the improvement of single-fiber transmission capacity. New technologies such as space division multiplexing (SDM) and multi-band transmission (MBT) are also potential means to further increase the transmission capacity of optical fibers. The use of spectrum expansion can increase the transmission capacity and distance product of a single optical fiber, as well as AI and digital twin technologies. It can improve the efficiency of optical network self-intelligent operation and maintenance, but there are still many theoretical and engineering application problems such as high operation and maintenance costs, which require the industry to work together to build a digital China.

2. Ocean photoelectric transmission technology faces new challenges

The “marine power” strategy proposes to make up for the shortcomings of the marine energy and information transmission industry chain, and new application scenarios such as submarine observation networks and underwater security warning systems have also emerged. Submarine optical cables can realize underwater high-power remote energy supply, large-scale data collection and information transmission, and can detect the physical, chemical, biological and material processes of the ocean system, thereby building a submarine observation system, driving marine energy development, national defense security, etc. Field upgrades.

With the development of marine observation from a single ocean buoy, cable submarine observation network, and self-contained observation platform to a combined, multi-form, and full-ocean three-dimensional observation system, long-distance, large-capacity submarine cables (such as 20kV submarine optical cable composite cables) and bipolar submarine optical cables) and optical-electrical composite cables for ocean stereoscopic observation and perception are also widely used. In the future, the submarine photoelectric composite cable will also help the establishment of the submarine data center, transmit stable power to the submarine data warehouse, and promote the industry to move towards green and low-carbon goals.

As the global submarine optical cables gradually reach the design life limit, the wave of submarine optical communication system upgrades is sweeping, the capacity of single optical fiber is increased, and the optical transmission consistency of the 10,000-kilometer submarine communication system across the ocean, high-voltage insulation technology, and the 10,000-meter deep submarine optical cable, Technical problems such as the hydrogen density of submarine repeaters are also emerging. Key technologies such as sensors, power supplies, and new materials have restricted the development of ocean photoelectric transmission technology.

Domestic system manufacturers, submarine cable manufacturers and material manufacturers should actively participate in the cultivation of the marine optical cable industry chain, and cooperate with scientific research institutes and colleges and universities to carry out “industry-university-research” cooperation. For example, Hengtong Group uses pump redundancy architecture to reduce the failure rate of each fiber pair of repeaters, and adopts a new generation of SDM technology (32FP submarine optical cable) to meet the large-capacity requirements of submarine optical communication systems. In view of the fact that some Western countries maliciously obstruct Chinese companies from bidding for international submarine cable communication projects, domestic companies can actively participate in the drafting and formulation of international standards and enhance their international discourse power to solve this problem.

With the wide application of 5G technology, higher requirements are placed on the electromagnetic compatibility performance of the cables used and the components, and the upper and lower edges of the test frequency need to be expanded. Among them, the test methods include triaxial tube-in-tube method, triaxial dark chamber method, line injection method and other methods. The test results of the triaxial method and the extended tube-in-tube method are stable and the test accuracy is high, but limited by the size of the tube body, products with larger sizes cannot be tested. The low-frequency test results of the line injection method are stable and can test large-sized products, but the test is more complicated, and different methods need to be selected according to the characteristics of different cables and components.