Deutsche Telekom’s edge for cloud gaming

Deutsche Telekom believes its network gives it an edge in the emerging game-streaming market. 

The operator is trialling a cloud-based service similar to the likes of Google and Microsoft.

The operator already offers IP TV and music as part of its entertainment offerings and will decide if gaming will be the third component. The operator will launch its MagentaGaming cloud-based service in 2020.  

“Since 2017, the biggest market in entertainment is gaming,” says Dominik Lauf, project lead, MagentaGaming at Deutsche Telekom.

Market research firms vary in their estimates but the global video gaming market was of the order of $138 billion in 2018 while the theatrics and home entertainment market totalled just under $100 billion for the same period.  

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ECOC 2019 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent ECOC show, held in Dublin. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from Huawei, OFS Fitel and ADVA.  

James Wangyin, senior product expert, access and transmission product line at Huawei  

At ECOC, one technology that is becoming a hot topic is machine learning. There is much work going on to model devices and perform optimisation at the system level.

And while there was much discussion about 400-gigabit and 800-gigabit coherent optical transmissions, 200-gigabit will continue to be the mainstream speed for the coming three-to-five years.  

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Lumentum on ROADM growth, ZR+, and 800G

CTO interview: Brandon Collings

• The ROADM market is experiencing a period of sustained growth  
• The Open ROADM MSA continues to advance and expand its scope
• ZR+ coherent modules will support some interoperability to avoid becoming siloed but optical performance differentiation remains key 

Source: Lumentum

Brandon Collings gave a Market Focus talk at the recent ECOC show in Dublin, where he explained why it is a good time to be in the reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) business. 

“Quantities are growing substantially and it is not one reason but a multitude of reasons,” says Collings. The CTO of Lumentum reckons the growth started some 18-24 months ago.  

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Gazettabyte’s 10th anniversary

Gazettabyte’s 10th anniversary passed quietly sometime in August. 

The work to create the website started earlier, as did the writing of the first stories to ensure there was content when the site went live in August 2009.

Gazettabyte has since published hundreds of stories and articles covering emerging technologies in the telecom and datacom industries. 

The stories highlight the many changes that have taken place over the last decade.

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Open ROADM gets deployed as work starts on Release 6.0

AT&T has deployed Open ROADM technology in its network and says all future reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) deployments will be based on the standard. 

“At this point, it is in a single metro and we are working on a second large metro area,” says John Paggi, assistant vice president member of technical staff, network infrastructure and services at AT&T. 

Shown are the various elements included in the disaggregated Open ROADM MSA. Also shown is the hierarchical SDN controller architecture with the federated controllers overseeing the optical layer and the multi-layer controller overseeing the path creation across the layer, from IP to optical. Source: Open ROADM MSA

Meanwhile, the Open ROADM multi-source agreement (MSA) continues to progress, with members working on Release 6.0 of the standard. 

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Infinera rethinks aggregation with slices of light

An optical architecture for traffic aggregation that promises to deliver networking benefits and cost savings was unveiled by Infinera at this week’s ECOC show, held in Dublin.

Traffic aggregation is used widely in the network for applications such as fixed broadband, cellular networks, fibre-deep cable networks and business services. 

Dave Welch

Infinera has developed a class of optics, dubbed XR optics, that fits into pluggable modules for traffic aggregation. And while the company is focussing on network edge applications such as 5G, the technology could be used in thedata centre. 

Optics is inherently a point-to-point communications technology. Yet optics is applied to traffic aggregation, a point-to-multipoint architecture, resulting in inefficiencies, says Infinera.  

“The breakthrough here is that, for the first time in optics’history, we have been able to make optics work to match the needs of an aggregation network,” says Dave Welch, founder and chief innovation officer at Infinera. 

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Acacia heralds the era of terabit-plus optical channels

Acacia Communications has unveiled the AC1200-SC2 that delivers 1.2 terabits over a single optical channel. 

The SC2 (single chip, single channel) is an upgrade of Acacia’s high-end AC1200 module. The AC1200 too is a 1.2-terabit module but uses two optical channels, each transmitting a 600-gigabit wavelength. The SC2 sends 1.2 terabits using two sub-carriers that fit within a single 150GHz-wide channel.

Each line is a data rate. Shown is the scope of how the baud rate and the modulation scheme can be varied and its impact on channel width, reach and data rate. Source: ADVA.

“In the SC2, we take care of everything so the user configures a single channel that is easier to manage in their network,” says Tom Williams, vice president of marketing at Acacia.

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