Cisco Systems' coherent power move

Cisco Systems’ acquisition of CoreOptics means the company has largely cornered the coherent market, says Telecom Pragmatics. 

Cisco Systems announced its intent to acquire the optical transmission specialist CoreOptics back in May. CoreOptics has digital signal processing expertise used to enhance high-speed long-haul dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical transmission. Cisco’s acquisition values the German company at US $99m.

"Let me be clear, we don’t believe 100Gbps serial will dominate the market for a long time, or 40Gbps for that matter"

Mark Lutkowitz, Telecom Pragmatics

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AT&T domain suppliers

Date	Domain	Partners
Sept 2009	Wireline Access	Ericsson
Feb 2010	Radio Access Network	Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson
April 2010	Optical and transport equipment	Ciena
July 2010	IP/MPLS/Ethernet/Evolved Packet Core	Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper, Cisco

The table shows the selected players in AT&T's domain supplier programme announced to date.

AT&T has stated that there will likely be eight domain supplier categories overall so four more have still to be detailed.

Looking at the list, several thoughts arise:

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Bringing WDM-PON to market

Significant power, size and cost challenges must be overcome before WDM-PON will be widely deployed.

 "We see just one way to bring down the cost, form-factor and energy consumption of the OLT’s multiple transceivers: high integration of transceiver arrays"

Klaus Grobe, ADVA Optical Networking

Considerable engineering effort will be needed to make next-generation optical access schemes using multiple wavelengths competitive with existing passive optical networks (PONs).

Such a multi-wavelength access scheme, known as a wavelength division multiplexing-passive optical network (WDM-PON), will need to embrace new architectures based on laser arrays and reflective optics, and use advanced photonic integration to meet the required size, power consumption and cost targets.

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The price of propping up an industry

Guest blog on Lightwave magazine, click here

To efficiency and beyond

Briefing:  Dynamic optical networks

Part 3: ROADM and control plane developments

ROADMs and control plane technology look set to finally deliver reconfigurable optical networks but challenges remain.

Operators are assessing how best to architect their networks - from the router to the optical layer - to boost efficiencies and reduce costs.  It is developments at the photonic layer that promise to make the most telling contribution to lowering the cost of transport, a necessity given how the revenue-per-bit that carriers receive continues to dwindle.

Global ROADM forecast 2009 -14 in US $ miliions Source: Ovum

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Reflecting light to save power

CIP Technologies is bringing its reflective component expertise to an EU-funded project to reduce the power consumption of optical systems.  

System vendors will be held increasingly responsible for the power consumption of their telecom and datacom platforms. That’s because for each watt the equipment generates, up to six watts is required for cooling. It is a burden that will only get heavier given the relentless growth in network traffic.

"Enterprises are looking for huge capacity at low cost and are increasingly concerned about the overall impact on power consumption"

David Smith, CIP Technologies

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BroadLight’s GPON ICs: from packets to apps

What is being announced?

BroadLight has announced its Lilac family of customer premise equipment (CPE) chips that support the Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) standard.

The company claims its GPON devices with be the first to be implemented using a 40nm CMOS process. The advanced CMOS process coupled with architectural enhancements will double processing performance while improving five-fold the packet-processing capability.  The devices also come with a hardware abstraction layer that will help system vendors tailor their equipment.

"Traffic models and service models are not stable, and there are a lot of differences from carrier to carrier"

Didi Ivancovsky, BroadLight

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