Ranovus shows 200 gigabit direct detection at ECOC

Ranovus has announced it first direct-detection optical products for applications including data centre interconnect.

Saeid AramidehThe start-up has announced two products to coincide with this week’s ECOC show being held in Dusseldorf, Germany.

One product is a 200 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) dense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) CFP2 pluggable optical module that spans distances up to 130km. Ranovus will also sell the 200Gbps transmitter and receiver optical engines that can be integrated by vendors onto a host line card. 

The dense WDM direct-detection solution from Ranovus is being positioned as a cheaper, lower-power alternative to coherent optics used for high-capacity metro and long-haul optical transport. Using such technology, service providers can link their data centre buildings distributed across a metro area. 

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BT makes plans for continued traffic growth in its core

Briefing: DWDM developments

Part 1

Kevin Smith: “A lot of the work we are doing with the trials have demonstrated we can scale our networks gracefully rather than there being a brick wall of a problem.”

BT is confident that its core network will accommodate the expected IP traffic growth over the next decade. Traffic in BT’s core is growing at between 35 and 40 percent annually, compared to the global average growth rate of 20 to 30 percent. BT attributes its higher growth to the rollout of fibre-based broadband across the UK.

The telco is deploying 100-gigabit wavelengths in high-traffic areas of its network. “These are key sites where we're running out of wavelengths such that we need to implement higher-speed ones,” says Kevin Smith, research leader for BT’s transport networks. The operator is now trialling 200-gigabit wavelengths using polarisation multiplexing, 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-16QAM).

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OIF moves to raise coherent transmission baud rate

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has started modulator and receiver specification work to enhance coherent optical transmission performance. The OIF initiative aims to optimise modulator and receiver photonics operating at a higher baud rate than the current 32 Gigabaud (Gbaud).

"We want the two projects to look at those trade-offs and look at how we could build the particular components that could support higher individual channel rates,” says Karl Gass of Qorvo and the OIF physical and link layer working group vice chair, optical.  

Karl Gass

The OIF members, which include operators, internet content providers, equipment makers, and optical component and chip players, want components that work over a wide bandwidth, says Gass. This will allow the modulator and receiver to be optimised for the new higher baud rate.

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Ciena's Tom Mock reflects on a career in telecom

It has been a strange week for Tom Mock. Not only is it his last at Ciena, after working for the company for 18 years, it has also been abnormally quiet since many of his colleagues are away at the OFC show in Los Angeles. 

Working for one technology company for so long may be uncommon, says Mock, but not at Ciena: the CTO has clocked 20 years while the CEO boasts 15 years. 

Tom Mock: “I’m about ready to go do something else.”

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Plotting transceiver shipments versus traffic growth

Chart Watch: LightCounting

Summing transceiver shipments in the core of the network and plotting the data against traffic growth provides useful insights into the state of the network.

"We use transceiver shipment data [from vendors] to calculate how fast the network is growing and compare it to the traffic growth," says Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of market research firm, LightCounting.

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