Trends of 25G SFP28 and 100G QSFP28 optical modules in 5G networks

As the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued 5G commercial licenses to China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Radio and Television. 5 g network over the next five years (fifth generation) mobile communication technology rapid development will become hot spot in the field of information and communication, bearing network construction and upgrade the first push light telecommunication network devices demand will continue to increase, at the same time, the era of cloud computing data center network demand explosive growth, domestic expansion of Internet companies, led by the BAT into IDC demand, The demand for high-speed optical modules, such as 25 Gbit/s optical modules and 100 Gbit/s optical modules, grows rapidly.

The factors that promote the speed upgrade of optical modules are mainly from the following aspects: on the one hand, the "Broadband China" strategy requires the implementation of 100 megabit optical fiber into the home, which increases the pressure of optical interfaces from the access layer to the upper level, and promotes the demand for high-speed optical modules. With the deployment of 5G, operators need to deploy wider bandwidth to achieve high-traffic data applications, such as telemedicine, VR, 4K video, etc. Therefore, each layer of the mobile network must have a higher rate, which also promotes the application of SFP28 25G optical module/QSFP28 100G optical module

In addition to the huge demand for optical modules in carrier networks, the accelerated construction of cloud computing data centers puts forward the demand for 25G /100G optical modules. From the perspective of traffic model, the traditional data center is dominated by north-south (interaction between clients and servers), while the cloud data center is dominated by east-west (exchange between internal servers). From the technical point of view, the "Leaf-Spine" network architecture is introduced to improve the data transmission rate within the data center.

At present, 25G /100G optical modules are commercialized in data centers, which is expected to become the mainstream application mode in the future. In terms of market, the total capital expenditure of the top 5 Internet service providers in the US is about 42 billion US dollars, which is close to the capital expenditure volume of the Chinese operator market. Therefore, the demand for 100G optical modules caused by the construction and renovation of global data center network will increase in scale, and the high-speed optical module market will remain high.

In the 4G network era, optical modules benefit from operators' optical network upgrade, cloud computing data center demand explosion and data center full brightness demand growth trend, especially 10G optical modules, while in the 5G network era, 25G optical modules and 100G optical modules will continue to grow due to application demand.