On August 29, 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Notice on Promoting the Evolution of 5G Lightweight (RedCap) technology and Application Innovation and Development (Draft for Comment) on its official website, aiming to promote the evolution of 5G lightweight (RedCap) technology, product research and development and industrialization, and vigorously promote the large-scale development of 5G applications.

The "Draft for Comments" clearly states that by 2025, the comprehensive capacity of 5G RedCap industry will be significantly improved, new products and new models will continue to emerge, the scale of integrated applications will increase, and the security capability will be enhanced simultaneously. Among them, cities above the county level across the country have achieved 5G RedCap scale coverage, and the number of 5G RedCap connections has achieved tens of millions of growth.

On October 16, 2023, the Notice of the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Promoting the Evolution and Application Innovation of 5G Lightweight (RedCap) Technology was officially released. The notice focuses on three aspects of development goals, main tasks, and safeguard measures, including 5G RedCap technology evolution, product research and development, and industrialization, to safeguard the large-scale development of 5G applications. So what is the latest information brought to the optical communication industry by the release of this notice? Let's analyze it!

5G RedCap scale coverage further empowers the optical communications industry. As an important part of optical communication, the optical module industry is developing very fast. With the development of 5G, cloud computing, big data, and Internet of Things technologies, the bandwidth of optical communication networks has been unable to meet the needs of current users, and the optical communication industry is ushering in a new technological change that will drive the optical transceiver industry to high speed, highly integrated, and intelligent.

The development of Internet of Things technology in the direction of high speed has put forward higher speed requirements for the downstream optical communication market, and solving problems such as signal loss, network delay, and improving user experience is the top priority for the current development of high speed optical communication technology. The main downstream application areas of optical modules are 5G base stations, data centers, optical fiber access, autonomous driving technology, industrial automation, etc., which promote the development of optical modules in the direction of intelligence.

At present, 1.6T optical modules have appeared in the optical module industry, and some companies have achieved mass production of 800G optical modules, and the mainstream application rate has also stepped from 10G-40G to 100G-400G. With the advent of ChatGPT artificial intelligence natural language processing tools, all walks of life have also launched different AI tools, which represents the global communications industry is in the stage of integration with a new generation of information technology, intelligence is the inevitable trend of the development of the global communications industry. At the same time, with the development of 5G communication technology in the direction of mass connection and large capacity, in order to achieve comprehensive coverage of signals, optical communication equipment needs to lay out a large number of optical modules. In addition to the improvement of transmission rate, optical modules also need to achieve high-density connection and drive optical modules to develop in the direction of high integration. Highly integrated technology is an important direction of future industry technology development, optical module companies spend a certain amount of energy in the development and industrialization of highly integrated technology in order to be far ahead of their peers.

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