WDM and 100G: A Q&A with Infonetics' Andrew Schmitt

The WDM optical networking market grew 8 percent year-on-year, with spending on 100 Gigabit now accounting for a fifth of the WDM market. So claims the first quarter 2014 optical networking report from market research firm, Infonetics Research. Overall, the optical networking market declined 2 percent, due to the continuing decline of legacy SONET/SDH.

In a Q&A with Gazettabyte, Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for optical at Infonetics Research, talks about the report's findings.

Q: Overall WDM optical spending was up 8% year-on-year: Is that in line with expectations?

AS: It is roughly in line with the figures I use for trend growth but what is surprising is how there is no longer a fourth quarter capital expenditure flush in North America followed by a down year in the first quarter. This still happens in EMEA but spending in North America, particularly by the Tier-1 operators, is now less tied to calendar spending and more towards specific project timelines.

This has always been the case at the more competitive carriers. A good example of this was the big order Infinera got in Q1, 2014.

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NFV moves from the lab to the network

Service providers have long covetted the efficiencies achieved by hyperscale data centre operators running applications on servers. The telecom operators want their networking functions to run on servers in the cloud, instead of having to buy - and maintain - custom boxes running proprietary software for each new service.  

Dor Skuler

In October 2012, several of the world's leading telecom operators published a document to spur industry action. Entitled Network Functions Virtualisation - Introductory White Paper, the document stressed the many benefits such a telecom transformation would bring: reduced equipment costs, power consumption savings, portable applications, and nimbleness instead of ordeal when a service is launched. 

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Netronome prepares cards for SDN acceleration

Source: Netronome

Netronome has unveiled 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards (NICs)  to accelerate data-plane tasks of software-defined networks.

Dubbed FlowNICs, the cards use Netronome's flagship NFP-6xxx network processor (NPU) and support open-source data centre technologies such as the OpenFlow protocol, the Open vSwitch virtual switch, and the OpenStack cloud computing platform.

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G.fast adds to the broadband options of the service providers

Feature: G.fast

Source: Alcatel-Lucent

Competition is commonly what motivates service providers to upgrade their access networks. And operators are being given every incentive to respond. Cable operators are offering faster broadband rates and then there are initiatives such as Google Fiber.

Internet giant Google is planning 1 Gigabit fibre rollouts in up to 34 US cities covering 9 metro areas. The initiative prompted AT&T to issue its own list of 21 cities it is considering to offer a 1 Gigabit fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) service.

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OFDM promises compact Terabit transceivers

Source ECI Telecom

A one Terabit super-channel, crafted using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), has been transmitted over a live network in Germany. The OFDM demonstration is the outcome of a three-year project conducted by the Tera Santa Consortium comprising Israeli companies and universities.

Current 100 Gig coherent networks use a single carrier for the optical transmission whereas OFDM imprints the transmitted data across multiple sub-carriers. OFDM is already used as a radio access technology, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular standard being one example.

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OFC 2014 product round-up - Final part

Part 2: Client-side technologies

The industry is moving at a clip to fill the void in 100 Gig IEEE standards for 100m to 2km links. Until now, the IEEE 10km 100GBASE-LR4 and the 10x10 MSA have been the interfaces used to address such spans.

But responding to data centre operators, optical players are busy developing less costly, mid-reach MSAs, as was evident at the OFC exhibition and conference, held in San Francisco in March. 

Meanwhile, existing IEEE 100 Gigabit standards are skipping to the most compact CFP4 and QSFP28 form factors. The -LR4 standard was first announced in a CFP in 2010, and moved to the CFP2, half the size of the CFP, in 2013. Now, several companies have detailed CFP4 -LR4 products, while Source Photonics has gone one better, announcing the standard in a QSFP28.

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Industry in a flurry of mid-reach MSA announcements

Another day, another multi-source agreement.

The CLR4 Alliance is the latest 100 Gig multi-source agreement (MSA) to address up-to-2km links in the data centre. The 100 Gig CLR4 Alliance is backed by around 20 companies including data centre operators, equipment vendors, optical module and component players and chip makers.

The table provides a summary of the latest MSAs and how they relate to the IEEE 100 Gigabit client interface standards. Source: Gazettabyte.

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