ECOC 2024 industry reflections - Final Part

In the final part, industry figures share their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Contributions are from Adtran’s Jörg-Peter Elbers, Lightwave Logic’s Michael Lebby, and Heavy Reading’s Sterling Perrin.

ECOC exhibition floor

Jörg-Peter Elbers, senior vice presendent, advanced technology, standards and IPR, Adtran, and a General Chair at this year’s ECOC.

ECOC celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. It was great to see scientists, engineers, and industry leaders from all around the globe at a vibrant gathering in Frankfurt.

ECOC dates to September 1975 when the inaugural event – dubbed the “European Conference on Optical Fiber Technology” - was held in London. In the early days, the focus was on megabit-per-second transmission for telephony applications. Now, we are advancing to petabit-per-second speeds to meet AI and cloud services demands. 

This year’s ECOC explored various cutting-edge topics, including 1.6 and 3.2 terabit-per-second (Tb/s) transceivers, multi-band and spatial division multiplexing (SDM) transmission, and innovations in access and home networks. Other discussions centred on the merits of linear drive versus regenerated optics, pluggable modules versus co-packaged engines, and the latest IP-over-DWDM architectures and technologies for the coherent edge.

The 50 years of ECOC symposium celebrated the amazing progress of optical communications in the past and painted a promising picture for the future.

David Payne, one of the luminary speakers, stated that hollow-core fibre would enable a new generation of WDM transmission systems (“amplifier-less”) with simpler terminals and higher fibre capacity. In a post-deadline paper, Linfiber reported a hollow-core fibre deployment with a fibre loss lower than solid-core fibre and progress on manufacturing and deployment issues, critical for mass-market adoption.

In the ECOC plenary session, Arista’s Andy Bechtolsheim discussed the race to build AI clusters for generative AI learning and inference. He emphasized that the next generation of hyperscale AI data centres could contain a million AI nodes requiring more than 3GW of electrical power—comparable to the output of a vast nuclear plant. These data centres present opportunities for millions of cost-efficient, low-power terabit-per-second optical interconnects.

The theme of optics for AI was complemented by exploring AI for optics, with multiple contributions examining how generative AI and agent-based models could streamline network operations. The accuracy, predictability, and the explainability of results remain active research topics. 

Another highlight was the optical satellite symposium, which discussed using 100 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) coherent optics for satellite communications. While inter-satellite links in commercial low-earth orbit (LEO) constellations use coherent transceiver technology, the use of optical ground links is still in its infancy. Panelists emphasised the challenges of maintaining cloud-free line-of-sight conditions and compensating for atmospheric turbulence to ensure continuous communication. They agreed that combining adaptive optics with time diversity (e.g., by interleaving) offers the best solution for turbulence mitigation, though it adds latency.

Other discussions covered fibre sensing for infrastructure and environmental monitoring and the commercial potential of quantum technologies, sparking much interest and heated debate in this year‘s Rump Session.

As ECOC 2024 concluded, it was clear that the conference not only celebrated five decades of advancement in optical communications but also set the stage for future innovations and challenges. 

Dr. Michael Lebby, CEO, Lightwave Logic

As the Chair of the Market Focus at ECOC’s Industry Exhibit, I can say that this year, we had probably the best sessions in ECOC’s 50-year history. For three days, each seat was taken at the Market Focus, which featured wall-to-wall programming on commercial trends, technologies, and roadmaps in optical communications.  

Presentations at the market focus sessions supported the big-show exhibition themes. Many talks focused on modules and subsystems. Lightwave Logic showed polymer silicon slot modulators with reliability data operating at 200Gbps with less than 1V drive, with initial results of polymer-plasmonic modulators operating with open 400Gbps eyes. While 400Gbps lanes are still on the roadmap, there were many discussions on what technologies could reach this level of performance, especially modulators. Polymer-plasmonic-based modulators seem to be the leader, with optical bandwidths exceeding 500GHz.  

While incumbent technologies are hard to displace, the emerging area of co-packaged pluggables is gaining interest among suppliers, especially for the terabit-per-second data rates sought. While progress was impressive, the reach of silicon photonics modulators for 200Gbps and beyond was a show floor concern.  

NewPhotonics discussed how to double data rates using its integrated optical equaliser, while others, such as Pilot Photonics, conveyed the exciting progress with comb laser arrays. Several speakers discussed the metrics of standards that support the AI/ machine learning trends for data centre operators and how optics can support the drive to higher data rates and lower power consumption.  

Areas of power consumption driven in part by digital signal processor (DSP) evolution were discussed. The interesting perspective is that if coherent optics are to be developed to serve the edge of the network, then using electronics to help the optics may not be enough; the optics need to perform better so that the electronics can be scaled down to reduce power consumption. It is a trade-off at the heart of many approaches to bring coherent optics to compete with direct-detect solutions for pluggable transceivers.  

The indication is that direct detection in data centre optics is not waning as quickly as the community once thought and looks to be a mainstay for pluggable transceiver solutions from 800Gbps, 1.6Tbps, 3.2Tbps, and even 6.4Tbps.  

A fireside chat explored the opportunities for copper at super short interconnects where the direct-attach copper (DAC) cables dominate. This 1m to 3m range has been evolving to active electrical copper (AEC) interconnects using smart electronics in recent years. Those of us who are solidly in the optics camp, while acknowledging that copper has owned this segment forever, are still hoping that platforms such as silicon photonics could sneak in and take share in the next five years. However, displacing an incumbent technology such as copper will not be easy, especially when metrics such as economies of scale, cost, and reliability come into play.

Several talks looked at next-generation implementations, such as quantum-dot lasers and photonic wire bonding, and driving VCSELs to ever-increasing speeds. Discussions took place that wondered if VCSELs have reached their limit in bandwidth and speed and if electronics could help them push performance further. A common theme evident was the innovative ideas and concepts to address 224Gbps per lane with optical technologies. While it has been generally accepted that this metric is emerging, several companies are still deciding how to address this speed and 400Gbps per lane.  

One big takeaway is that if you have a new and innovative platform to enable things like 3.2Tbps transceivers that is disruptive, think very carefully about whether that disruptive technology needs the infrastructure to be disruptive, too.

Sterling Perrin, Senior Principal Analyst, Heavy Reading

Although I’ve attended nearly every OFC show over the past 25 years, this was my first ECOC. Most of my meetings were centred around an IP-over-DWDM project I’ve worked on for several months, including video interviews conducted at the show with the partnering companies: the OIF, Ciena, Juniper, and Infinera. These are all posted on Light Reading.

Building on its work at OFC 2024, the OIF’s pluggables demo at ECOC spotlighted four applications: 

• 400ZR and 800ZR, 
• Open ZR+ at 400GbE, 
• OpenROADM at 400GbE, and 
• 100ZR

The expanding scope of coherent pluggable is impressive, and the interop work includes optics that the OIF is not directly defining—such as Open ZR+, OpenROADM, and 100ZR. ECOC 2024 marked OIF’s first interoperability demonstration of 100ZR modules, an application driven by telecom operators as opposed to hyperscalers.

Another key aspect of the OIF’s IP-over-DWDM work demonstrated at ECOC is the common management interface specification (CMIS) for plug-to-host interoperability between routers and pluggable optics. Plug-to-host interop is essential for wider IP-over-DWDM adoption among telecom operators, so the work is timely.

Related to pluggables management in IP-over-DWDM networks, I attended the Open XR Forum’s symposium on the show floor. The organisation is promoting a dual management approach to pluggables that includes host independent management to support pluggables features that aren’t yet supported in the routers or in CMIS. 

During a Q&A, Telefonica’s Oscar Gonzales de Dios acknowledged that host-independent management is controversial (including within Telefonica) but said it is the only way to add point-to-multipoint functions on pluggables for now. 

Quantum-safe encryption is another area of research interest, particularly quantum key distribution (QKD), and ECOC 2024 was a great place to get up to date. I attended the rump session debate on quantum technologies, expertly hosted by Peter Winzer (Nubis), Rupert Ursin (QTlabs), and David Neilson (Nokia Bell Labs). It was standing-room-only, and I anticipated strong pro-QKD sentiment. I was wrong! The dominant view was that QKD is impractical, technically limited, too expensive, and needs more real customer demand. Several people argued that post quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms are sufficient to meet the market needs, without the complexity and costs that QKD brings.

For analysts, conferences like ECOC are the most efficient means of quickly learning what’s hot in the industry. Conferences are equally great places to know what is not hot. I didn’t hear the words “5G,” “xHaul,” “fronthaul,” “6G,” or even “mobility” uttered once during the four days I was in Frankfurt.