ECOC 2024 industry reflections - Part III

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are contributions from Aloe Semiconductor's Chris Doerr, Hacene Chaouch of Arista Networks, and Lumentum's Marc Stiller.

Autumn morning near the ECOC congress centre in Frankfurt

Chris Doerr, CEO of Aloe Semiconductor

If there was one overall message from ECOC 2024 this year, it is that incumbent technologies are winning in the communications market.

Copper is not giving up. It consumes less power and is cheaper than optics, and now, more electronics such as retimers are being applied to keep direct-attach copper (DAC) cables going.  Also, 200-plus gigabaud (GBd) made a debut in coherent optics, but in intensity-modulation direct-detect (IMDD), 50GBd and 100GBd look like they are here to stay for several more years.

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OFC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent OFC show in San Diego. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from Huawei, Drut Technologies and Aloe Semiconductor.

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

Some ten years ago datacom took the helm of the optical transceiver market from legacy telecom operators to command a much larger volume of short-reach optics and extend its vision into dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM).

At OFC, the industry witnessed another passing-of-the-torch moment as Nvidia took over the dominant position in the optics market where AI compute is driving optical communication. The old guard of Google is now following while others are closely watching.

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