In the final OFC 2026 reflections, Cisco’s Bill Gartner, Vivek Raghuraman of Mixx Technologies, and Vincent Fraisse at STMicroelectronics share their thoughts
Bill Gartner, Senior Vice President, Optical Systems and Optics, Cisco
The AI buzz was palpable at OFC. It is super exciting to be in the optical networking industry and be part of the AI infrastructure buildout.
If you came to our booth, you would have seen the socks we gave out that say “Optics are Sexy Again,” which I think sums it up.
Scale-across networking was a hot topic at the Optica Executive Forum, where executives shared and shaped their perspectives. Scale-across differs from traditional data centre interconnect (DCI) in that it enables Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) connectivity in AI back-end networks, whereas traditional DCI provides connectivity between front-end networks.
Benefiting from scale-across networking, we expect the deployment of 800ZR/ZR+ coherent pluggables to be far larger than previously anticipated.
Acacia announced that it had already shipped 25,000 800-gigabit digital signal processor (DSP) ports, contributing to its coherent technology market leadership.
Another optical enabler of scale-across is the line system, and several new multi-rail line systems were announced, including Cisco’s Open Transport 3000.
To support the Petabyte-scale bandwidth demands of scale-across, more fibres will be needed, and each fibre pair requires in-line amplification. The multi-rail open-line system combines multiple fibre pairs in parallel on the same link over ultra-long-haul distances, which enables our customers to deploy additional fibre capacity with reduced amplifier power and space needs.
Optics for scale-out were also demonstrated with 1.6-terabit optics delivering ultra-high bandwidth connectivity and 800-gigabit linear pluggable optics (LPO) to reduce optical module power consumption by half compared to retimed optical modules.
Next-generation architectures were a key topic this year, with continued focus on co-packaged optics (CPO) development and four new MSAs – 400G Optical, XPO (eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics), Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI), and Open CPX. We’re seeing AI demand driving aggressive development timelines and new architectures. Technology transitions like co-packaged optics, liquid cooling and optics in scale-up networking are building momentum in the industry, but will co-exist with existing approaches over the next generation or two.
OFC is always my favourite week of the year because I get to talk to so many customers and industry colleagues. This year did not disappoint.
Vivek Raghuraman, CEO, Mixx Technologies
Last year, we left OFC with a prediction: that 2026 would be where system-level transformation takes over. Having spent the week in Los Angeles, I can say the industry got closer, but the path is complicated.
The shift that stood out most was not a product announcement or a new form factor. It is a change in tone. The co-packaged optics conversation, which dominated 2025, has matured from architectural vision to engineering accountability.
What unsettled me was a parallel current running through several sessions — a gravitational pull toward complexity. Thermally sensitive multi-wavelength designs, denser laser integration, and manufacturing yields that are unknown.
Technically ambitious, yes. But complexity has a cost that doesn’t show up in a lab. It shows up in the forward-error correction (FEC) overhead — the latency, the power, the operational burden carried not by the engineers who designed the system, but by the ones who run it at scale. That is not a scaling strategy, it is scaling debt.
The discussions that cut through the noise were the ones asking a simpler question: when you move from a controlled demo environment to thousands of deployed nodes, does the architecture still hold?
The answer to complexity is not more complexity.
Scale-up will follow scale-out architectures, and it will do so on the back of electrical SerDes, DR optics, and 200-gigabit /400-gigabit linear interfaces — proven, deployable, and built to run at scale by the engineers who operate them.
Deterministic performance kept surfacing — not as a feature, but as a deployment prerequisite. Inference workloads don’t forgive jitter or variance. That reality is beginning to shape architectural decisions in ways that were not visible even at OFC 2025.
A fundamental shift is underway — and it starts with radix. More endpoints connected directly means fewer switches in the path and fewer hops between nodes. The network flattens. The fabric breathes.
In AI infrastructure, every hop is a latency you cannot afford and power you cannot reclaim. That is not a marginal gain, it is a structural one.
That, ultimately, is what OFC 2026 revealed most clearly: an industry at a genuine inflection point. The ambition is real. The investment is significant. But alignment is still missing — around standards, around manufacturability, and around what truly matters at the system level. Until that alignment emerges, complexity will continue to masquerade as progress.
I left Los Angeles with a clear conviction: the demonstrations are real, and the deployments are measured, exposing the gap between what demos well and what scales.
Vincent Fraisse, Executive Vice President, RF and Optical Communications Sub-Group at STMicroelectronics
With my STMicroelectronics foundry hat on, I first looked at technology breakthroughs at OFC. I found a few things: first, the 400 gigabit-per-lane is a hard barrier to overcome due to limits on modulator bandwidth, driver power, optical loss, and signal integrity.
Modulator technology contenders were demonstrated at the show – Thin-film Lithium Niobate, Indium Phosphide, plasmonic, EML and even pure silicon photonics – but the path to industrialisation and large volumes remain challenging.
Still, the appetite is big to pursue “fast and narrow” design improvements, and the first technology to deliver enough performance margin and volume readiness will win big.
Meanwhile, the industry continues to densify bandwidth through more lanes, more wavelengths per lane, and tighter integration, such as the new XPO multi-source agreement. Integration and volume readiness will matter even more than before, and my takeaway is that silicon photonics is the right technology to bet on for the near future because it offers a strong path to scale, best functional integration and manufacturing leverage.
However, the “slow and wide” signalling camp also showed great progress at the show. With the OCI MSA, with links based on silicon photonics or more innovative solutions like microLEDs, the industry is trying to reduce the energy per bit transferred with a more de-serialised architecture.
This is much like what computing did years ago: it stopped chasing gigahertz clock speeds and focussed on parallelism. For optics it means increasing bandwidth density to terabits-per-second-per-millimetre-edge. The main technical challenges remain device efficiency, coupling loss, thermal budget, and link calibration.
The biggest momentum, of course, came from the optics boom for the scale-up network. As copper reaches its limit in reach and bandwidth density, many demos focused on making co-packaged optics a nearer reality rather than a distant dream.
Most implementations would actually be classified as near-packaged optics, but what matters is that industry seems to be moving quickly to enable volume deployment within a couple of years. This will require improving advanced packaging, increasing wafer-level test scalability, and addressing system serviceability through fibre-attach connectors, among other issues.
Again, the show exposed a new CPX MSA, many proofs-of-concept, a clear focus on the problems to solve, and many innovations driven by start-ups. But now, all the big companies have plans. This will become a reality sooner than most people think.