North American operators in an optical spending rethink

Optical transport spending by the North American operators dropped 13 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2014, according to market research firm Dell'Oro Group.

Operators are rethinking the optical vendors they buy equipment from as they consider their future networks. "Software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) - all the futuristic next network developments, operators are considering what that entails," says Jimmy Yu, vice president of optical transport research at Dell’Oro. "Those decisions have pushed out spending."

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NeoPhotonics to expand its tunable laser portfolio

Part 1: Tunable lasers

NeoPhotonics will become the industry's main supplier of narrow line-width tunable lasers for high-speed coherent systems once its US $17.5 million acquisition of Emcore's tunable laser business is completed. Gazettabyte spoke with Ferris Lipscomb of NeoPhotonics about Emcore's external cavity laser and the laser performance attributes needed for metro and long haul.   

Key specifications and attributes of Emcore's external cavity laser and NeoPhotonics's DFB laser array. Source: NeoPhotonics.

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Alcatel-Lucent serves up x86-based IP edge routing

Alcatel-Lucent has re-architected its edge IP router functions - its service router operating system (SR OS) and applications - to run on Intel x86 instruction-set servers.

Shown is the VSR running on one server and distributed across several servers. Source: Alcatel-Lucent.

The company's Virtualized Service Router portfolio aims to reduce the time it takes operators to launch services and is the latest example of the industry trend of moving network functions from specialist equipment onto stackable servers, a development know as network function virtualisation (NFV).     

"It is taking IP routing and moving it into the cloud," says Manish Gulyani, vice president product marketing for Alcatel-Lucent's IP routing and transport business. 

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STMicro chooses PSM4 for first silicon photonics product

STMicroelectronics has revealed that its first silicon photonics product will be the 100 Gigabit PSM4. The 500m-reach PSM4 multi-source agreement (MSA) is a single-mode design that uses four parallel fibres in each direction. The chip company expects the PSM4 optical engine to be in production during 2015. 

"We have prototypes and can show them running very well at 40 Gig [4x10 Gig]," says Flavio Benetti, group vice president, digital product group and general manager, networking products division at STMicroelectronics. "But it is expected to be proven at 4x25 Gig in the next few months." STMicroelectronics has just received its latest prototype chip that is now working at 4x25 Gig. 

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Silicon photonics book scheduled for early 2016

Daryl Inniss, practice leader, components at Ovum, and I have started work on a book on silicon photonics. The book, to be written during 2015, will be published by Elsevier.

The work will provide an assessment of silicon photonics and its market impact over the next decade. The title will explore key trends and challenges facing the telecom and datacom industries, provide a history of silicon photonics, and detail its importance. The title will also pinpoint those applications that will benefit most from the technology.

Gazettabyte hopes to share some of the insights and information gathered during the writing of the book. And if this book project is of interest, please feel free to contact us. 

ECOC reflections: final part

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. 

Dr. Ioannis Tomkos, Fellow of OSA & Fellow of IET, Athens Information Technology Center (AIT)

With ECOC 2014 celebrating its 40th anniversary, the technical programme committee did its best to mark the occasion. For example, at the anniversary symposium, notable speakers presented the history of optical communications. Actual breakthroughs discussed during the conference sessions were limited, however.

Ioannis Tomkos

It appears that after 2008 to 2012, a period of significant advancements, the industry is now more mainstream, and significant shifts in technologies are limited. It is clear that the original focus four decades ago on novel photonics technologies is long gone. Instead, there is more and more of a focus on high-speed electronics, signal processing algorithms, and networking. These have little to do with photonics even if they greatly improve the overall efficient operation of optical communication systems and networks.

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Infinera targets the metro cloud

Infinera has styled its latest Cloud Xpress product used to connect data centres as a stackable platform, similar to how servers and storage systems are built. The development is another example of how the rise of the data centre is influencing telecoms.

"There is a drive in the industry that is coming from the data centre world that is starting to slam into the telecom world," says Stuart Elby, Infinera's senior vice president of cloud network strategy and technology.

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