BT’s first quantum key distribution network

The trial of a commercial quantum-secured metro network has started in London.

Professor Andrew Lord

The BT network enables customers to send data securely between sites by first sending encryption keys over optical fibre using a technique known as quantum key distribution (QKD).

The attraction of QKD is that any attempt to eavesdrop and intercept the keys being sent is discernable at the receiver.

The network uses QKD equipment and key management software from Toshiba while the trial also involves EY, the professional services company.

EY is using BT’s network to connect two of its London sites and will showcase the merits of QKD to its customers.

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The ONF adapts after sale of spin-off Ananki to Intel

Intel’s acquisition of Ananki, a private 5G networking company set up within the ONF last year, has meant the open-model organisation has lost the bulk of its engineering staff.

Timon Sloane

The ONF, a decade-old non-profit consortium led by the telecom operators, has developed some notable networking projects over the years such as CORD, OpenFlow, one of the first software-defined networking (SDN) standards, and Aether, the 5G edge platform.

Its joint work with the operators has led to virtualised and SDN building blocks that, when combined, can address comprehensive networking tasks such as 5G, wireline broadband and private wireless networks.

The ONF’s approach has differed from other open-source organisations. Its members pay for an in-house engineering team to co-develop networking blocks based on disaggregation, SDN and cloud.

The ONF and its members have built a comprehensive portfolio of networking functions which last year led to the organisation spinning out a start-up, Ananki, to commercialise a complete private end-to-end wireless network.

Now Intel has acquired Ananki, taking with it 44 of the ONF’s 55 staff.

“Intel acquired Ananki, Intel did not acquire the ONF,” says Timon Sloane, the ONF’s newly appointed general manager. “The ONF is still whole.”

The ONF will now continue with a model akin to other open-source organisations.

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Effect Photonics buys the coherent DSP team of Viasat

Effect Photonics has completed the acquisition of Viasat’s staff specialising in coherent digital signal processing and forward error correction (FEC) technologies and the associated intellectual property.

Harald Graber

The company also announced a deal with Jabil Photonics - a business unit of manufacturing services firm Jabil - to co-develop coherent optical modules that the two companies will sell.

The deals enable Effect Photonics to combine Viasat’s coherent IP with its indium phosphide laser and photonic integrated circuit (PIC) expertise to build coherent optical designs and bring them to market.

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ADVA Optical Engines adds bidirectional multiplexing

• ADVA expands its multiplexing modules to include the network edge
• The company is developing optical modules as part of a three-pillar business strategy
• ADVA’s merger with ADTRAN is approaching its conclusion

ADVA has expanded its family of multiplexing optical modules with a 40km bidirectional design for access networks. 

Saeid Aramideh

Until now, ADVA’s three multiplexer optical module products have focussed on IP routing and switching.

The multiplexing modules combine lower-speed optical interfaces into a higher-speed port.

The company unveiled its 4-by-10-gigabit MicroMux Edge BiDi, its first multiplexer module for the network edge, at the OFC show held in March in San Diego.

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BT’s Open RAN trial: A mix of excitement and pragmatism

“We in telecoms, we don’t do complexity very well.” So says Neil McRae, BT’s managing director and chief architect.

He was talking about the trend of making network architectures open and in particular the Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), an approach that BT is trialling.

“In networking, we are naturally sceptical because these networks are very important and every day become more important,” says McRae

Whether it is Open RAN or any other technology, it is key for BT to understand its aims and how it helps. “And most importantly, what it means for customers,” says McRae. “I would argue we don’t do enough of that in our industry.”

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OFC highlights a burgeoning coherent pluggable market

A trend evident at the OFC show earlier this month was the growing variety of coherent pluggable modules on display.

Whereas a coherent module maker would offer a product based on a coherent digital signal processor (DSP) and a basic design and then add a few minor tweaks, now the variety of modules offered reflects the growing needs of the network operators.

Tom WilliamsAcacia, part of Cisco, announced two coherent pluggable to coincide with OFC.

The Bright 400ZR+ QSFP-DD pluggable form factor is based on Acacia’s existing 400ZR+ offering. It has a higher transmit power of up to 5dBm and includes a tunable filter to improve the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) performance.

Acacia’s second coherent module is the fixed wavelength 400-gigabit 400G ER1 module designed for point-to-point applications.

“I can understand it being a little bit confusing,” says Tom Williams, vice president of marketing at Acacia. “We have maybe five or six configurations of modules based on the same underlying DSP and optical technology.”

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Building an AI supercomputer using silicon photonics

•  Luminous Computing is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer 

Silicon photonics is now mature enough to be used to design complete systems.

So says Michael Hochberg (pictured), who has been behind four start-ups including Luxtera and Elenion whose products used the technology. Hochberg has also co-authored a book along with Lukas Chrostowski on silicon photonics design.

In the first phase of silicon photonics, from 2000 to 2010, people wondered whether they could even do a design using the technology.

“Almost everything that was being done had to fit into an existing socket that could be served by some other material system,” says Hochberg.

A decade later it was more the case that sockets couldn’t be served without using silicon photonics. “Silicon photonics had dominated every one of the transceiver verticals that matter: intra data centre, data centre interconnect, metro and long haul,” he says.

Now people have started betting their systems using silicon photonics, says Hochberg, citing the examples as lidar, quantum optics, co-packaged optics and biosensing.

Several months ago Hochberg joined as president of Luminous Computing, a start-up that recently came out of stealth mode after raising $105 million in Series A funding.

Luminous is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer that it believes will significantly outperform existing platforms.

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