Since the launch of Thailand 4.0, Thailand has continued to make significant progress towards creating a digitally-driven, value-based economy. Continuous improvements in internet penetration and speeds are helping to fuel sustained digital economy growth across multiple sectors, driven by shifts in consumer behaviour and technological advancements.
The demand for digital services will be ubiquitous, whether it is for improving user and customer experiences in digital-first sectors such as e-commerce or raising production efficiency in large industrial sectors. Scaling the delivery of the high-performance connectivity required for the next era of Thailand’s growth, while also leaving a more sustainable impact, rests on the next generation of optical networks – which Thailand’s communications services providers (CSPs) will play a key role in delivering.
Opening new frontiers in scale and sustainability
Fibre optical networks provide the foundation needed for Thailand’s society and businesses to gear up for their digital future. This is especially to meet the key requirements of improved bandwidth, latency and stability to power myriad advanced applications.
People and organisations wish to do more with their internet. However, the primary challenge for CSPs in managing network evolution is to scale network capacity to support new, high-bandwidth services, all while driving down the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the network, including costs for equipment, power, and operations.
Concurrently, demand for bandwidth continues to grow exponentially, and shows no signs of slowing down.
This growth is further fuelled by ever-increasing fibreization at the edges of the network, faster service speeds for 5G, consumer and business connections, and ongoing growth of video consumption, as well as emerging applications such as virtual reality and augmented reality, and autonomous vehicles. All this traffic drives the need for ever-faster IP router interface speeds such as 400 and 800 Gigabit Ethernet (400GE/800GE). This in turn requires coherent wavelengths to operate at faster speeds and with better performance to enable more efficient transport across metro, long-haul and sub-sea networks.
Lastly, CSPs must also seriously consider the sustainability dimension. With our planet under stress due to climate change, increased performance must also reduce power consumption to meet sustainability targets. Especially considering recent global shocks to energy supplies, which have also led to pricing uncertainty, solutions that reduce “power per bit” become increasingly important. This requires meaningful reductions in network operations costs while also mitigating risk.
Faster, farther, greener
Our sixth-generation super-coherent Photonic Service Engine sets new milestones in scale, performance, and sustainability for optical transport networks.
It supports a distinctive chip-to-chip interface that enables it to be deployed in pairs to power 2.4Tb/s coherent transport solution (an industry first), allowing CSPs to efficiently transport any combination of high-speed client services, including 400 and 800GE. With a three-fold increase in performance, platforms enabled by this new engine support transport of 800GE services in metro and data centre interconnect (DCI) applications – and with a reach of 2,000km and beyond, across long-haul networks and trans-oceanic cables. Overall, the new engine reduces the number of coherent optics needed for long-haul transport by up to 50 percent, allowing network operators to reduce capital expenditure and TCO.
The new engine also enables greener and more sustainable networks with better power efficiency. Leveraging the latest digital signal processor (DSP) silicon integrated circuits and tightly integrating with silicon photonics, the new engine reduces the power per bit by 40 percent than existing solutions. This allows more capacity to be deployed using fewer numbers of coherent optics, helping CSPs reduce network power consumption by 60 percent in regional and long-haul networks.
The way forward
Thailand’s future depends on building networks that have the capacity and scalability to help its society and economy with a smaller environmental footprint. CSPs can meet those needs, helping to explore new frontiers in the emerging new high-bandwidth applications. The next generation in our super-coherent optical engine is opening these new frontiers while staying within the limits imposed by economics and the environment.
Across the region, various generations of our engines are already being leveraged by CSPs to meet their customers’ future requirements for low-latency, high-capacity and robust networks. These are particularly relevant for 5G, cloud applications, DCI and Webscaler connectivity, in addition to meeting the growing consumer demand for online video and internet usage.
Thailand’s CSPs are already gearing up to enhance their advanced optical fibre capabilities, preparing the country’s society and businesses for the upcoming digital age. Their efforts will be further enhanced by our next-generation super-coherent Photonic Service Engine which is able to facilitate the growth of nationwide 5G coverage and 5G-enabled applications and advance the effectiveness of supply chain operations. This paves the way for Thailand 4.0, where high-speed connectivity and holistic growth can be achieved while minimising the impact on the surrounding environment.