The APC’s blueprint for silicon photonics

The Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) wants to smooth the path for silicon photonics to become a high-volume manufacturing technology.

Jeffery Maki

The organisation is talking to companies to tackle issues whose solutions will benefit the photonics technology.

The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to act as an industry catalyst to prove technologies and reduce the risk associated with their development, says Jeffery Maki, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a member of the Advanced Photonics Coalition's board.

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Ciena offers enterprises vNF pick and choose

Ciena, working with partners, has developed a platform for service providers to offer enterprises network functions they can select and configure with the click of a button.

Dubbed Agility Matrix, the product enables enterprises to choose their IT and connectivity services using software running on servers. It also promises to benefit service providers' revenues, enabling more adventurous service offerings due to the flexibility and new business models the virtual network functions (vNFs) enable. Currently, managed services require specialist equipment and on-site engineering visits for their set-up and management, while the contracts tend to be lengthy and inflexible.

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Ciena adds software to enhance network control

Engineers at Ciena have developed software to provide service providers with greater control over their networks. The operators' customers will also benefit from the software control, using a web portal to meet their own networking needs. 

Source: Ciena

"Networks can become more dynamic," says Tom Mock, senior vice president, corporate communications at Ciena. "Operators can now offer more on-demand services." If much work has been done in recent years to make the network's lower layers dynamic, attention is turning to software to make the networks programmable, he says.

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OFC 2014 industry reflections - Part 1

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts following the recent OFC 2014 exhibition and conference: the noteworthy developments and trends, what they learnt at the show, and the topics to track in the coming year.  

T.J. Xia, distinguished member of technical staff at Verizon

The CFP2 form factor pluggable - analogue coherent optics (CFP2-ACO) at 100 and 200 Gig will become the main choice for metro core networks in the near future. 

I learnt that the discrete multitone (DMT) modulation format seems the right choice for a low-cost, single-wavelength direct-detection 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)  interface for data ports, and a 4xDMT for 400GbE ports. 

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Ericsson and Ciena collaborate on IP-over-WDM and SDN

Do company partnerships work? Ericsson and Ciena certainly think so, and provide a compelling argument for their collaboration in the areas of IP-over-WDM and software-defined networking (SDN). More such partnerships should also be expected.

Jan Häglund

Ericsson and Ciena have signed a global strategic agreement that provides Ericsson with Ciena's optical networking technology, while Ciena benefits from Ericsson's broader service provider relationships.

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Will LTE lead to new revenues for the operators?

The opportunities and challenges the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard poses for mobile operators. An article for the Mobile World Congress show for the magazine Informilo, click here.  

AT&T domain suppliers

Date	Domain	Partners
Sept 2009	Wireline Access	Ericsson
Feb 2010	Radio Access Network	Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson
April 2010	Optical and transport equipment	Ciena
July 2010	IP/MPLS/Ethernet/Evolved Packet Core	Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper, Cisco

The table shows the selected players in AT&T's domain supplier programme announced to date.

AT&T has stated that there will likely be eight domain supplier categories overall so four more have still to be detailed.

Looking at the list, several thoughts arise:

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