In today's digital era, fiber networks are the lifeblood of the information society. Their health status directly determines communication quality and user experience. However, fiber networks face many challenges during deployment and operation. However, fibers face numerous challenges in deployment and operation: some are exposed externally due to improper shallow burial, making them susceptible to natural disasters; frequent construction activities often lead to excavation-related breaks; additionally, issues such as fiber theft, contamination, aging, and poor splicing further contribute to operational failures. Fiber faults not only impair signal quality but also interrupt services and increase transmission latency, significantly hindering data transmission efficiency. Currently, repairing fiber cuts demands manual intervention, often requiring multiple site visits with specialized instruments to pinpoint the breakage. Each visit cost is expensive, while repairs typically take 2 to 3 days. These inefficiencies not only degrade user experience but also place substantial operational strain on carriers.

In response to these problems, Huawei has launched the Intelligent Fiber Health Care Solution. The solution uses a fiber health care (FHC) module on routers to accurately detect faults, eliminating the need to carry detection instruments to sites. Instead, carriers can use Network Digital Map to detect the health status of optical fibers in real time. This helps to save costs, shorten fault detection, and simplify fault locating compared with conventional maintenance.

Traditional fiber fault detection typically requires maintenance personnel to locate fiber cuts onsite using instruments before coordinating with local teams to locate physical failure points. This usually requires two to three site visits on average. Using the FHC module to check the fiber health status, so it is no longer necessary to visit sites multiple times while carrying instruments. Maintenance personnel can start fiber cut detection using commands or initiate automatic detection using Network Digital Map. Network Digital Map can be used for online inspection to effectively identify potential problems such as fiber aging, contamination, and suboptimal splicing. This facilitates intelligent fiber health management and reduces the costs associated with site visits. Take a carrier as an example, this carrier experience 20,000 fiber faults per year, Huawei's Intelligent Fiber Health Care Solution is estimated to save this carrier about millions of dollars in annual maintenance.

Huawei's Intelligent Fiber Health Care Solution configures the FHC module on router ports. In this way, the module is connected to service modules, allowing it to emit light and accurately detect the fiber status and locate faults. Leveraging the Self-Diagnosis optical signal noise reduction technology and high-precision spectrum analysis algorithm, the solution achieves a remarkable 10-meter fault locating accuracy for fibers at distances of up to 80 kilometers in mere minutes. Base on Fiber Health Care Solution, the fault type, occurrence time, and the accurate distance between the fault location and the device can be seen, greatly improving the fiber fault locating efficiency.

Huawei Intelligent Fiber Health Care Solution integrates Network Digital Map to precisely pinpoint faults within the geographic information system (GIS) and intuitively display the specific fault location. This capability streamlines maintenance efforts by guiding teams directly to the site, significantly enhancing the fault resolution efficiency. In addition, the digital map can display the detection signals on screen in real time in the form of waveform diagrams to display fiber status and type. By detecting the status instead of merely locating faults, it delivers all-around visualized O&M.

This solution is one of the key use cases of Huawei AI WAN. It deeply integrates the FHC module and digital map functions to provide precise, long-distance, automatic fiber cut detection and visualization. In this way, it achieves efficient O&M, improves user experience, and helps carriers build automated and highly reliable IP bearer networks.