ROADMS: When "-less" is more

The telecom industry is right up there when it comes to acronyms and complex naming schemes but it is probably no worse than other industries.

One only has to look at neighbouring IT and cloud computing in particular with its PaaS, IaaS and SaaS (Platform-, Infrastructure- and Software-as-a-Service).

But when it comes to agile optical networking and the reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM), what is notable is the smarts that are being added and yet all are described using the “-less” suffix: colourless, directionless, contentionless and gridless.

These are all logical names once the enhancements they add are explained. But as Infonetics Research analyst Andrew Schmitt has pointed out, the industry could do better with its naming schemes. Even the most gifted sales person may be challenged selling the merits of a colourless, directionless product.

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Optical transmission beyond 100Gbps

Briefing: High-speed optical transmission. 

Part 3: What's next?

Given the 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) optical transmission market is only expected to take off from 2013, addressing what comes next seems premature. Yet operators and system vendors have been discussing just this issue for at least six months.

And while it is far too early to talk of industry consensus, all agree that optical transmission is becoming increasingly complex. As Karen Liu, vice president, components and video technologies at market research firm Ovum, observed at OFC 2010, bandwidth on the fibre is no longer plentiful.

“We need to keep a very close eye that we are not creating more problems than we are solving.”

Brandon Collings, JDS Uniphase.

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