As the financial sector, governments, and enterprises are moving into the fast lane of digital transformation, industry applications are becoming increasingly diverse, complex, and systematic, requiring more 1 Gbps or lower chunks of bandwidth with deterministic latency and high security. To meet the unique service requirements of different customers, the industry urgently needs next-generation private line products from operators that can provide flexible bandwidth, diversified isolation, high security, and high reliability.

FGU Slices Emerge at the Right Time and Win Industry-wide Recognition

Metro Transport Network (MTN), proposed by China Mobile for 5G transport, is an innovative next-generation converged transport network architecture with sliced Ethernet at the core. The Fine Granularity Unit (FGU) technology inherits the efficient Ethernet from MTN and refines the granularity of hard slicing from 5 Gbps to 10 Mbps, meeting differentiated service transport requirements — such as low bandwidth and high isolation and security — in different scenarios, including 5G, vertical industries, and private lines. With its low cost and hard isolation capabilities, FGU will likely reshape the application deployment of 5G, vertical industries, and government and enterprise private lines.

Leveraging MTN Slicing, China Mobile Tianjin Provides Super Private Lines to Build Industry Competitiveness

China Mobile Tianjin — a leading service provider in the industry — upgrades its product capabilities at a faster speed based on the advantageous MTN. Through the indispensable network slicing technology, it provides high-speed, ubiquitous super private lines that feature cloud-network integration, intelligent security, and premium services. To illustrate, network slicing provides the following key functions in the deployment of the super private lines:

• Deterministic experience: Thanks to network slicing, China Mobile Tianjin customizes dedicated slice resources for different industries and customers, ensuring their deterministic service experience. On the cloud side, the company has deployed a cloud private network to pre-connect multiple clouds — such as China Mobile cloud and industry clouds — and provides dedicated slices for industry customers. On the network side, China Mobile Tianjin uses the industry-unique MTN slicing technology to provide premium cloud access experience through the FGU technology (10 Mbps-level slicing).
• Converged services: China Mobile Tianjin provides converged services through E2E slicing. On the network side, it uses 1 Gbps/5 Gbps pipe slicing to isolate industry customers' services from B2C services. On the customer side, it uses the industry's first box-shaped cloud access terminal that supports 10 Mbps-level slicing to enable access of multiple services — such as site-to-Internet, site-to-cloud, and site-to-site services — through one line for industry customers.
• Visualized slices: Using the E2E slicing technology, NCE (an intelligent management and control system), and IFIT (an in-band flow measurement technology), China Mobile Tianjin provides customized packages and services for customers, offering intelligent slice usage experience that features easy and visualized O&M.

China Mobile Tianjin Joins Forces with Huawei to Improve Customer Service Experience through FGU Slices

Looking ahead to the future and aiming to bring better service experience to industry customers, MTN Mbps-level FGU defines comprehensive Operation, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) functions along with slicing timeslot and bandwidth adjustment mechanisms based on industry customers' requirements for service reliability and long-term bandwidth evolution. The following highlights the capabilities that FGU offers.

• Refined slicing bandwidth: The flexible and comprehensive FGU frame format design supports 10 Mbps-level slicing. It provides N x 10 Mbps independent slices based on industry customers' service requirements, significantly improving the utilization of network slicing resources.
• High security: The TDM timeslot switching technology implements hard isolation through exclusive occupation of transmission resources, ensuring service security.
• High reliability: The comprehensive OAM detection and Automatic Protection Switching (APS) mechanisms implement real-time detection of service path faults and provide carrier-class service recovery within 50 ms.
• Deterministic latency: E2E non-blocking timeslot switching achieves nanosecond-level service jitter and ensures stable service transmission latency.
• Hitless slice bandwidth adjustment: The comprehensive timeslot and bandwidth adjustment mechanisms ensure zero packet loss of original services when the timeslot and bandwidth of an FGU slice decrease or increase.

Huawei works closely with China Mobile in the MTN technical field. While promoting MTN as an ITU-T standard, Huawei has submitted over 300 standard proposals, more than any other vendor. Huawei also provides full support in the formulation of China Mobile's FGU standard, whose initiation has been officially approved by the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA) in 2020. This indicates that the FGU standard has been widely recognized in the industry both in and outside China. Looking ahead, China Mobile will continue to work with Huawei to fuel the industry development with innovative technologies.

With the in-depth application of the MTN slicing technology in the industry, the FGU technology will help China Mobile continuously build competitive advantages in industry digital transformation solutions, dive deep into the convergence and innovation of numerous industries, and build an open and symbiotic industry ecosystem to enable their intelligent digital transformation.