Huawei Chair Says the Future of Comms Is Fiber-To-The-Room
- Reference: 0178166130
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/24/2224236/huawei-chair-says-the-future-of-comms-is-fiber-to-the-room
- Source link:
> Huawei's chairman Xu Zhijun -- aka Eric Xu -- has called out China's enormous lead in [1]fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations. Speaking at last week's Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, Xu [2]shared his views on the telecommunications industry's future growth opportunities and said by the end of 2025 China will be [3]home to 75 million FTTR installations -- but just 500,000 exist outside the Middle Kingdom. Xu said FTTR will benefit businesses by increasing their internet connection speeds, helping them address spotty Wi-Fi coverage, allowing them to deploy tech in more places, and therefore creating more opportunities to adopt productivity-boosting devices and services. FTTR will also help carriers to sell more expensive packages, he said.
Xu also urged telecom carriers to target high-growth user groups like delivery riders and livestream influencers, citing their above-average data consumption and revenue potential. Delivery riders, who will make up 5% of the global workforce by 2030, use four times more voice minutes and double the data of average users, while influencers generate five times the data usage and four times the revenue.
He also pushed for greater collaboration between carriers and platforms to deliver more high-res video content, and called for improved efficiency in networking equipment and device power use. "Xu said Huawei is here to help carriers deliver any of the scenarios he mentioned," concludes Sharwood. "And of course it is, because the Chinese giant has a thriving business selling to telcos -- or at least to telcos beyond the liberal democracies that have largely decided Huawei's close ties with Beijing mean the company and its products represent an unacceptable threat to the operation of critical infrastructure."
[1] https://carrier.huawei.com/en/products/fixed-network/sub-solution-access/fttr-to-home
[2] https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2025/6/mwcsh-pathways-for-driving-growth
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/23/huawei_chair_eric_xu_vision/?td=rt-3a
Crowded Asian cities (Score:1)
If your Home is a 1 room apartment then fiber to the home becomes fiber to the room.
Re: (Score:2)
No, that's not what FTTR is about. It is specifically for multi-room dwellings.
Fiber to every single-room dwelling would be FTTH. We don't try to be political in our definition of a home.
Aw but I want (Score:2)
Porn-to-the-retina
Curious... (Score:3)
What seems very odd about the page of Huawei fiber-to-the-room products is how unambitious they are.
Sure, if you want to do ethernet at nontrivial distances or above 10Gb fiber is where it's at; but why are you selling fiber as the glorious enabling technology for a bunch of wifi 6 APs that will be lucky to actually need 2.5GbE; with 'power over fiber' cabling which presumably means pulling a bunch of copper anyway and is significantly length-limited?
There are, absolutely, circumstances where having fiber runs would be invaluable; it just seems like "a wifi AP in every room so the signal doesn't suck!" is basically the least fiber-relevant use case going.
Re: (Score:2)
Huawei didn't invent FTTR.
It's been rolling out in vendor offerings for a couple years now.
> Sure, if you want to do ethernet at nontrivial distances or above 10Gb fiber is where it's at;
Far more than that.
> but why are you selling fiber as the glorious enabling technology for a bunch of wifi 6 APs that will be lucky to actually need 2.5GbE;
Because running copper to every room to support >1Gbps is a pain in the ass. PoF cable is thin and highly flexible.
> with 'power over fiber' cabling which presumably means pulling a bunch of copper anyway and is significantly length-limited?
The copper is thin enough (due to the low power requirements) that you don't notice it.
> There are, absolutely, circumstances where having fiber runs would be invaluable; it just seems like "a wifi AP in every room so the signal doesn't suck!" is basically the least fiber-relevant use case going.
It'd actually eliminate just short of 95% of our support calls, and we'd no longer have to threaten oursourcing them to India to keep up with the terrible fucking wifi practices in use around the
Re: (Score:2)
Because running copper to every room to support >1Gbps is a pain in the ass. PoF cable is thin and highly flexible.
Eh?
I've run Cat 6A cable to a few rooms in my house. It was a pain in the arse, but that was nothing t do with the thickness or flexibility of the cable. The major pain in the arse factor was having to, say, crawl under my house in order to pull the cable pulling rope because there's no way of getting it from one end to the other otherwise. The next annoyance was putting holes in the skirtin
Re: (Score:2)
> for a bunch of wifi 6 APs
Wifi 6? Do you always install infrastructure for last year's technology? Personally I pulled Cat6A cable through my house despite only having 1000baseT network cards. Infrastructure for what you own today is dumb. Plan infrastructure for what you will own in a decade.
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on how much power you need. For up to a few watts they use the light as the energy source with a PV cell.
It's not FTTR though... (Score:2)
It's not FTTR though... they are talking about running fiber to a base station and having a "slave" node (think whole home wi-fi with nodes on each floor or in each room- mesh network)... while those nodes support a fiber back haul... it doesn't need it.. and most installs don't have it... it more like FTTM (fiber to the modem)
while having a fiber on the last mile is great, there is no need to run fiber to each room if you have existing copper (most existing copper can handle the speeds just fine)...
for new
Re: (Score:1)
Incorrect.
It's fiber to the room.
The ONT also serves as an OLT for room-based OLUs connected into a splitter.
You are correct that there is no need for existing copper. The goal is to get rid of Wifi coverage support calls, which are most of them.
Re: (Score:2)
*ONUs
Why? (Score:2)
What is the point?
Re: (Score:1)
To make your kid complain less about your internet, which will make you complain less about your internet, which will make me outsource less jobs to India.
You cant run fiber in walls as structured cable (Score:5, Insightful)
For around the house networks, you cant run fiber to wall ports and terminate it easily. It requires special connectors and cleavers to cut and do right. It doesnt bend freely like CAT cable. You need special optics at each end, depending on many parameters, they are sensitive. CAT6A will do 10Gbps around the house at 300ft and CAT6 will do it at 160ft. There is no need for FTTR, especially to then power Wifi devices, when the wifi devices cant even do power over fiber. The ethernet standard is the way to go. Huawei is advertising fiber from the gateway to multiple access points around the house cabled with fiber. That is just stupid.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm sure it works for inflating the cost of networking and building (construction) projects... I understand that's an attractive thing for a Chinese business to do nowadays.
Re: (Score:2)
And that seems to be about the only thing it's good for. I have the whole house cabled up for GbE, of which about 95% of the cable runs carry maybe 9600bps of traffic, a few carry maybe 10Mbps, and may one or two 100Mbps, with occasional bursts of a few hundred Mbps. And I'm a technical user, most of my nontechnical neighbours are using well under 100Mbps for the whole house despite being on gigabit fibre.
So yea, FTTR is great for press releases or shareholder reports or something, but not much else for
Re: You cant run fiber in walls as structured cabl (Score:3)
Those "can'ts" you listed are easily solvable at scale; if there's demand then optical adapters can be amazingly cheap to produce. Without demand they are expensive.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
No scale needed. Patch cables are available in small amounts, too.
You don't bond the fucking fiber to a LC connector at the damn wall terminal.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean "at scale"? We have scale in the form of people. A friend of mine moved into a new house about 4 months ago. God bless him he's not the brightest bulb in the light fixture, but he was trivially abel to attach an ethernet cable to his old telecom outlet with some tape, go to the other and and yank at it harder than a 15 year old who just discovered his first porno. He then proceeded to spend an hour terminating the Cat6 cable. It worked. (Yes we could have done it in 5 minutes, but the fact
Re: (Score:2)
Patch cables and fiber management loops, same way we do it in a datacenter.
Also, Cat7 doesn't bend freely, lol. It's a huge pain in the ass.
I'd run fiber over copper any day of the week, and that's why it's what we do in the datacenter.
Biggest problem with fiber to an individual room is the lack of fiber interfaces on devices. Nobody wants to have to throw a fiber switch in every in every room.
Re: (Score:2)
> Biggest problem with fiber to an individual room is the lack of fiber interfaces on devices.
Oddly enough, my 30-year-old stereo amplifier has one. I'll finally have a use for it!
Re: (Score:2)
Heh.
Ya, I never ended up using any TOSLink either.
Sadly, I don't think you'd get more than a few feet of transmission with TOSLink over 9/125um cable.
Re: (Score:2)
I expect not. TOSLink has a 1mm fiber core, not 9um. 100 times the diameter.
9um is for single-mode fiber which requires real lasers and has a transmission distance measured in kilometers.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
So you think that they've run 75,000,000 connections for no reason at all? Is this simple racism, or did you just bang something out without thinking in order to claim first post?
Re: (Score:2)
There is already a need for FTTR in some parts of the world.
For example, Japan has had 20GBps FTTH for years now. As well as internet, it carries 8k TV and other services. At the moment you need a few different cables coming off the optical transceiver box. It would be better if you could just have a few fibre lines coming to a single point in your house, and then in each room you can split that out into ethernet, TV, and any other services.
It could be done with ethernet, but we are reaching the limits of w