Unblocking electricity transmission's bandwidth bottlenecks with fgOTN

(March 2025) Giovanne Massinga is a man with a plan. He’s ICT Director at EDM, the main power company in Mozambique, which has undertaken a five-year strategy requiring massive investment in operations and infrastructure.

 “We have many power stations, and the distance between them is very long,” Massinga tells Huawei Editor-in-Chief Gavin Allen in an interview for Transform Talks. “We need ultra-long haul transmission to make sure we get the wave.” 

To accomplish that goal, EDM has traditionally used Synchronous Digital Hierarchy, or SDH, a standardized technology that can send multiple streams of data long distances by bundling it into fixed-size "frames" or containers that make it easier to transport.

EDM wanted to keep using SDH technology but needed more bandwidth than SDH could provide. This created a bottleneck.

That’s where fgOTN comes in. An acronym for fine-grain Optical Transport Network, fgOTN is an advanced version of traditional Optical Transport Network (OTN) technology that makes data transmission even more efficient and flexible.

Unlike regular OTN, which handles data in large, fixed chunks, fgOTN can break it into much smaller, more flexible units. This allows fgOTN to use network resources more efficiently, especially for smaller or varying amounts of data. By allocating only the exact amount of bandwidth needed for each service, fgOTN reduces waste and maximizes the use of the network.

“fgOTN is able to meet those requirements – the low latency, the high reliability, the low jitter numbers – because it’s based on existing SDH technology, “says Bert Klaps, an ITU-T standards expert.

Because fgOTN is an enhancement of the optical transport network, users automatically benefit from everything that OTN has to offer: the very high capacities of up to 1 terabit, the long single  strength connection capable of going thousands of kilometers, and all the intelligence and tools that the OTN network can provide.

“After many years of investigating different technologies, we finally chose fgOTN as our communications standard,” Massinga said. “We have installed it in our live network and are very happy with the results.”