ECOC 2014: Industry reflections on the show

Gazettabyte asked several attendees at the recent ECOC show, held in Cannes, to comment on key developments and trends they noted, as well as the issues they will track in the coming year. 

Daryl Inniss, practice leader, components at market research firm, Ovum

 It took a while to unwrap what happened at ECOC 2014. There was no one defining event or moment that was the highlight of the conference.

The location was certainly beautiful and the weather lovely. Yet I felt the participants were engaged with critical technical and business issues, given how competitive the market has become.

Kaiam’s raising US $35 million, Ranovus raising $24 million, InnoLight Technology raising $38 million and being funded by Google Capital, and JDSU and Emcore each splitting into two companies, all are examples of the shifting industry structure.  

On the technology and product development front, advances in 100 Gig metro coherent solutions were reported although products are coming to market later than first estimated. The client-side 100 Gig is transitioning to CFP2. Datacom participants agree that QSFP28 is the module but what goes inside will include both parallel single mode solutions and wavelength multiplexed ones.

Finisar’s 50 Gig transmission demonstration that used silicon photonics as the material choice surprised the market. Compared to last year, there were few multi-mode announcements. ECOC 2014 had little excitement and no one defining show event but there were many announcements showing the market’s direction.

There is one observation from the show, which while not particularly exciting or sexy, is important, and it seems to have gone unnoticed in my opinion. Source Photonics demonstrated the 100GBASE-LR4, the 10km 100 Gigabit Ethernet standard, in the QSFP28 form factor. This is not new as Source Photonics also demonstrated this module at OFC. What’s interesting is that no one else has duplicated this result. 

There will be demand for a denser -LR4 solution that’s backward compatible with the CFP, CFP2, and CFP4 form factors. It is unlikely that the PSM4, CWDM4, or CLR4 will go 10km and they are not optically compatible with the -LR4. The market is on track to use the QSFP28 for all 100 Gig distances so it needs the supporting optics. The Source Photonics demonstration shows a path for 10km. We expect to see other solutions for longer distances over time.

One surprise at the show was Finisar's and STMicroelectronics's demonstration of 50 Gig non-return-to-zero transmission over 2.2km on standard single mode fiber. The transceiver was in the CFP4 form factor and uses heterogeneous silicon technologies inside. The results were presented in a post-deadline paper (PD.2.4).  The work is exciting because it demonstrates a directly modulated laser operating above 28 Gig, the current state-of-the-art.

The use of silicon photonics is surprising because Finisar has been forced to defend its legacy technology against the threat of transceivers based on silicon photonics. These results point to one path forward for next-generation 100 Gig and 400 Gig solutions.

In the coming year, I’m looking for the dominant metro 100G solution to emerge. When will the CFP2 analogue coherent optical module become generally available? Multiple suppliers with this module will help unleash the 100 Gig line-side transmission market, drive revenue growth and the development for the next-generation solution. 

Slow product development gives competing approaches like the digital CFP a chance to become the dominant solution. At present, there is one digital CFP vendor with a generally available product, Acacia Communications, with a second, Fujitsu Optical Components, having announced general availability in the first half of 2015. 

Neal Neslusan, vice president of sales and marketing at fabless chip company, MultiPhy.

It was impressive to see Oclaro's analogue CFP2 for coherent applications on the show floor, albeit only in loopback mode. Equally impressive was seeing ClariPhy's DSP on the evaluation board behind the CFP2.

I saw a few of the motherboard-based optics solutions at the show. They looked very interesting and in questioning various folks in the business I learned that for certain data centre applications these optics are considered acceptable. Indeed, they represent an ability to extract much higher bandwidth from a given motherboard as compared to edge-of-the-board based optics, but they are not pluggable.

Traditionally, pluggable optics has been the mainstay of the datacom and enterprise segments and these motherboard-based optics have been relegated to supercomputing. This is just another example, in my opinion, of how the data centre market is becoming distinct from the datacom market.

Where there any surprises at the show? I was surprised and alarmed at the cost of the Martini drinks at the hotel across the street from the show, and they weren't even that good!

Regarding developments in the coming year, the 8x50 Gig versus 4x100 Gig fight in the IEEE is clearly a struggle I will follow. I think it will have a great impact on product development in our industry. If 8x50 Gig wins, it may be one of the few times in the history of our industry that a less advanced solution is chosen over a more advanced and future-proofed one.

The physical size of the next-generation Terabit Ethernet switch chips will have a much larger impact on the optics they connect to in the coming years, compared to the past. This work combined with the motherboard-based optics may create a significant change in the solutions brought to bear for high-performance communications.

John Lively, principal analyst at market research firm, LightCounting.

There were several developments that I noted at the show. ECOC helped cement the view that 100 Gig coherent is mainstream for metro networks. Also more and more system vendors are incorporating Raman/ remote optically pumped amplifier (ROPA) into their toolkit. ROPA is a Raman-based amplifier where the pump is located at one end of the link, not in some intermediate node. Another trend evident at ECOC is how the network boundary between terrestrial and submarine is blurring.

As for developments to watch, I intend to follow mobile fronthaul/ backhaul, higher speed transceiver developments, of course, and how the mega-data-centre operators are disrupting networks, equipment, and components.

For the ECOC reflections, final part, click here