As the business to consumer (B2C) market expands slowly, global operators are all actively seeking to find new profit growth points. Now they begin to cast their eyes on the business to business (B2B) market for the increasingly demands in it. The huge potentials of B2B market lure operators to occupy the B2B market quickly. 

Presently, enterprise customers have become importance sources of incomes for operators. In some developed markets, more than 60% of the operating revenues of operators come from enterprise customers. Statistics show that the number of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in European and American regions is more than 40 million, and that number even reaches 50 million in China. Many of these enterprises have requirements on ultra-broadband access and enterprise private line (EPL) intercommunication among branches. Therefore, how to fast build high-quality ultra-broadband networks for SMEs has become a main concern for operators. 

High-Valued Enterprise Customers Have Demands for Gigabit Networks

With the widely recognition of FTTx networks' advantages in terms of full-service bearer, bandwidth upgrade, and network maintenance, global top operators begin to apply FTTx networks for high-valued enterprise customers. FTTx networks-based enterprise access solutions can bear various services and moreover, they can effectively serve enterprise customers' demands on high-speed Internet surfing using existing access resources. 

Typically, enterprise services require for symmetric bandwidth and high reliability. As enterprise networks move towards the cloud, traffic between data centers and enterprises, and between different enterprise branches sores by tens of times. Simultaneously, with the spring up of video services in different industries, such as safe city, smart transportation, and remote education and healthcare, these new services pose increasingly demands on enterprise networks. Providing 1–10 Gb/s symmetric bandwidths is the key to retain enterprise customers. 

Currently, FTTx networks mainly employ the GPON mode, which delivers an upstream and downstream bandwidth of 1.25 Gb/s and 2.5 Gb/s respectively. This mode is designed to provide asymmetric access for home users and therefore, it is hard to achieve Gigabit upgrade for enterprise networks. Additionally, considering future's explosively growing bandwidth demands in enterprise markets, access solutions must support smooth evolution. Therefore, in order to meet the increasing bandwidth and service requirements of enterprise customers in the next decade, the next-generation access platform needs to support flexible large-bandwidth switching capabilities, and more reliable and intelligent performance. 

MA5800: the Best Choice for Gigabit EPLs

The traditional access platform with the centralized switching architecture can meet rate requirements in the GPON era. However, when it comes to 10G PON times, this platform faces bandwidth and performance bottlenecks since it supports concurrent streaming only for a few gigabit users. In addition, due to software and hardware closeness, the traditional platform cannot enable smooth SDN evolution, failing to cope with the cloud transition of enterprise networks. 

In 2014, Huawei released the MA5800, the industry's first distributed access platform. Unlike the traditional access platform that supports centralized switching, the MA5800 employs the distributed architecture. Developed based on open software and hardware systems, it removes the bottleneck for the system performance. Moreover, the MA5800 supports a switching capacity 5–10 times of that of the traditional access platform, and allows flexible bandwidth expansion. Because of these, the MA5800 can not only realize non-blocking access of 10G PON and 40G PON for current applications, but also meet the evolution requirements of new technologies (such as 100G PON) in the next decade, bringing symmetric ultra-broadband (1–10 Gb/s) to enterprise customers. In addition, one MA5800 can be virtualized to multiple OLTs for different enterprise customers, which enhances service reliability and user experience. In this case, customers can deploy MA5800 devices and do not need to replace them for a decade, thereby reducing capital expenditure (CAPEX) of networks construction. 

In February 2016, based on the MA5800, Huawei launched the innovative Flex-PON solution. This solution further upgrades bearer capabilities of the MA5800, and fully supports the smooth evolution towards 40G PON or even 100G PON. In addition to protecting most of operators' investments on their live networks, the Flex-PON solution effectively meets bandwidth upgrade demands in regard to enterprise networks. 

Huawei also released the MA5800-based symmetric 10G PON solution for commercial use in September 2016, with which EPL networks can be upgraded to gigabit access networks. Under this solution, operators deploy XGS-PON uniformly in central offices and then provide asymmetric and symmetric bandwidths respectively for home users and enterprise customers based on requirements. This solution, which has been tested by leading operators in China, South Korea, and Europe, can effectively help operators build Giga EPL networks. 

By now, Huawei MA5800 devices have been widely deployed by different operators in various regions (including mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Denmark, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey). These devices support accesses for full services (including home, enterprise, and mobile backhaul services), helping operators quickly achieve business success.