Business services and mobile revive WDM-PON interest
"WDM-PON is many things to many people" - Jon Baldry
It was in 2005 that Novera Optics, a pioneer of WDM-PON (wavelength-division multiplexing, passive optical networking), was working with Korea Telecom in a trial involving 50,000 residential lines. Yet, one decade later, WDM-PON remains an emerging technology. And when a WDM-PON deployment does occur, it is for business services and mobile backhaul rather than residential broadband.
WDM-PON delivers high-capacity, symmetrical links using a dedicated wavelength. The links are also secure, an important consideration for businesses, and in contrast to PON where data is shared between all the end points, each selecting its addressed data.
One issue hindering the uptake of WDM-PON is the lack of a common specification. "WDM-PON is many things to many people," says Jon Baldry, technical marketing director at Transmode.
One view of WDM-PON is as the ultimate broadband technology; this was Novera's vision. Other vendors, such as Transmode, emphasise the WDM component of the technology, seeing it as a way to push metro-style networking towards the network edge, to increase bandwidth and for operational simplicity.
WDM-PON's uptake for residential access has not yet happened because the high bandwidth it offers is still not needed, while the system economics do not match those of PON.
Gigabit PON (GPON) and Ethernet PON (EPON) are now deployed in the tens of millions worldwide. And operators can turn to 10G-EPON and XG-PON when the bandwidth of GPON and EPON are insufficient. Beyond that, TWDM-PON (Time and Wavelength Division Multiplexing PON) is an emerging approach, promoted by the likes of Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei. TWDM-PON uses wavelength-division multiplexing as a way to scale PON, effectively supporting multiple 10 Gigabit PONs, each riding on a wavelength.
Carriers like the reassurance a technology roadmap such as PON's provides, but their broadband priority is wireless rather than wireline. The bigger portion of their spending is on rolling out LTE since wireless is their revenue earner.
As for fixed broadband, operators are being creative.
G.fast is one fixed broadband example. G.fast is the latest DSL standard that supports gigabit speeds over telephone wire. Using G.fast, operators can combine fibre and DSL to achieve gigabit rates and avoid the expense of taking fibre all the way to the home. BT is one operator backing G.fast, with pilot schemes scheduled for the summer. And if the trials are successful, G.fast deployments could start next year.
Deutsche Telekom is promoting a hybrid router to customers that combines fixed and wireless broadband, with LTE broadband kicking in when the DSL line becomes loaded.
Meanwhile, vendors with a WDM background see WDM-PON as a promising way to deliver high-volume business services, while also benefiting from the operator's cellular push by supporting mobile backhaul and mobile fronthaul. They don't dismiss WDM-PON for residential broadband but accept that the technology must first mature.
Transmode announced recently its first public customer, US operator RST Global Communications, which is using the vendor's iWDM-PON platform for business services.
"Our primary focus is business and mobile backhaul, and we are pushing WDM deeper into access networks," says Baldry. "We don't want a closed network where we treat WDM-PON differently to the way we treat the rest of the network." This means using the C-band wavelength grid for metro and WDM-PON. This avoids having to use optical-electrical-optical translation, as required between PON and WDM networks, says Baldry.
The iWDM-PON system showing the seeder light source at the central office (CO) optical line terminal (OLT), and the multiplexer (MDU) that selects the individual light band for the end point customer premise equipment (CPE). Source: Transmode.
Transmode's iWDM-PON
Several schemes are being pursued to implement WDM-PON. One approach is seeded or self-tuning, where a broadband light source is transmitted down the fibre from the central office. An optical multiplexer is then used to pick off narrow bands of the light, each a seeder source to set the individual wavelength of each end point optical transceiver. An alternative approach is to use a tunable laser transceiver to set the upstream wavelength. A third scheme combines the broadband light source concept with coherent technology that picks off each transceiver's wavelength. The coherent approach promises extremely dense, 1,000 wavelength WDM-PONs.
Transmode has chosen the seeded scheme for the iWDM-PON platform. The system delivers 40, 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) wavelengths spaced 50 GHz apart. The reach between the WDM-PON optical line terminal (OLT) and the optical network unit (ONU) end-points is 20 km without dispersion compensation fibre, or 30 km using such fibre. The platform uses WDM-PON SFP pluggable modules. The SFPs are MSA-compliant and use a fabry-perot laser and an avalanche photo-detector optimised for the injection-locked signal.
"We use the C-band and pluggable optics, so the choice of using WDM-PON optics or not is up to the customer," says Baldry. "It should not be a complicated decision, and the system should work seamlessly with everything else you do, enabling a mix of WDM-PON and regular higher speed or longer reach WDM over the same access network, as needed."
Baldry claims the approach has economic advantages as well as operational benefits. While there is a need for a broadband light source, the end point SFP WDM-PON transceivers are cheaper compared to fixed or tunable optics. Also setting the wavelengths is automated; the engineers do not need to set and lock the wavelength as they do using a tunable laser.
"The real advantage is operational simplicity," says Baldry, especially when an operator needs to scale optically connected end-points as they grow business and mobile backhaul services. "That is the intention of a PON-like network; if you are ramping up the end points then you have to think of the skill levels of the installation crews as you move to higher service volumes," he says.
RST Global Communications uses Transmode's Carrier Ethernet 2.0 as the service layer between the demarcation device (network interface device or NID) at the customer's premises, while using Transmode's packet-optical cards in the central office. WDM-PON provides the optical layer linking the two.
An early customer application for RST was upgrading a hotel's business connection from a few megabits to 1Gbps to carry Wi-Fi traffic in advance of a major conference it was hosting.
Overall, Transmode has a small number of operators deploying the iWDM-PON, with more testing or trialing it, says Baldry. The operators are interested in using the WDM-PON platform for mobile backhaul, mobile fronthaul and business services.
There are also operators that use installed access/ customer premise equipment from other vendors, exploring whether Transmode's WDM-PON platform can simplify the optical layer in their access networks.
Further developments
Transmode's iWDM-PON upgrade plans include moving the system from a two fibre design - one for the downstream traffic and one for the upstream traffic - to a single fibre one. To do this, the vendor will segment the C-band into two: half the C-band for the uplink and half for the downlink.
Another system requirement is to increase the data rate carried by each wavelength beyond a gigabit. Mobile fronthaul uses the Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) standard to connect the remote radio head unit that typically resides on the antenna and the baseband unit.
CPRI data rates are multiples of the basic rate of 614.4 Mbps. As such 3 Gbps, 6 Gbps and rates over 10 Gbps are used. Baldry says the current iWDM-PON system can be extended beyond 1 Gbps to 2.5 Gbps and potentially 3 Gbps but because the system in noise-limited, the seeder light scheme will not stretch to 10 Gbps. A different optical scheme will be needed for 10 Gigabit. The iWDM-PON's passive infrastructure will allow for an in-service upgrade to 10 Gigabit WDM-PON technology once it becomes technically and economically viable.
Transmode has already conducted mobile fronthaul field trials in Russia and in Asia, and lab trials in Europe, using standard active and passive WDM and covering the necessary CPRI rates. "We are not mixing it with WDM-PON just yet; that is the next step," says Baldry.
Further information
WDM-PON Forum, click here
Lightwave Magazine: WDM-PON is a key component in next generation access
NeoPhotonics' PIC transceiver tackles PON business case
Gazettabyte completes its summary of optical announcements at ECOC, held in Amsterdam. In the third and final part, NeoPhotonics’ GPON multiport transceiver is detailed.
Part 3: NeoPhotonics
“Anything that can be done to get high utilisation of your equipment, which represents your up-front investment, helps the business case"
Chris Pfistner, NeoPhotonics
NeoPhotonics has announced a Gigabit passive optical network (GPON) transceiver designed to tackle the high up-front costs operators face when deploying optical access.
The GPON optical line terminal (OLT) transceiver has a split ratio of 1:128 - a passive optical network (PON) supporting 128 end points - yet matches the optical link budget associated with smaller split ratios. The transceiver, housed in an extended SFP module, has four fibre outputs, each supporting a conventional GPON OLT. The transceiver also uses a mode-coupling receiver implemented using optical integration.
According to NeoPhotonics, carriers struggle with the business case for PON given the relatively low take-up rates by subscribers, at least initially. “Anything that can be done to get high utilisation of your equipment, which represents your up-front investment, helps the business case,” says Chris Pfistner, vice president of product marketing at NeoPhotonics. “With a device like this, you can now cover four times the area you would normally cover.”
The GPON OLT transceiver, the first of a family, has been tested by operator BT that has described the technology as promising.
Reach and split ratio
The GPON transceiver supports up to 128 end points yet meets the GPON Class B+ 28dB link budget optical transceiver specification.
The optical link budget can be traded to either maximise the PON’s distance, limited due to the loss per fibre-km, or to support higher split ratios. However, a larger split ratio increases the insertion loss due to the extra optical splitter stages the signal passes through. Each 1:2 splitter introduces a 3.5dB loss, eroding the overall optical link budget and hence the PON’s reach.
GPON was specified with a Class B 20dB and Class C 30dB link budget. However once PON deployments started a 28dB Class B+ was created to match the practical requirements of operators. For Verizon, for example, a reach of 10-11km covers 95% of its single family units, says NeoPhotonics.
Operators wanting to increase the split ratio to 1:64 need an extra 4dB. This has led to the 32dB link budget Class C+. For shorter runs, in such cases as China, the Class C+ is used for a 1:128 split ratio. “They [operators] are willing to give up distance to cover an extra 1-by-2 split,” says Pfistner.
NeoPhotonics supports the 1:128 split ratio without suffering such loss by introducing two techniques: the mode-coupling receiver (MCR) and boosting the OLT transceiver's transmitter power.
A key issue dictating a PON performance is the sensitivity of the OLT's burst mode receiver. The upstream fibres are fed straight onto the NeoPhotonics’ MCR, eliminating the need for a 4x1 combiner (inverse splitter) and a resulting 6dB signal loss.
The GPON OLT transceiver showing the transmit and the mode-coupling receiver. Source: NeoPhotonics
The MCR is not a new concept, says Pfistner, and can be implemented straightforwardly using bulk optics. But such an implementation is relatively large. Instead, NeoPhotonics has implemented the MCR as a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) fitting the design within an extended SFP form factor.
“The PIC draws on our long experience of planar lightwave circuit technology, and [Santur’s] indium phosphide array technology, to do fairly sophisticated devices,” says Pfistner. NeoPhotonics acquired Santur in 2011.
The resulting GPON transceiver module fits within an SFP slot but it is some 1.5-2cm longer than a standard OLT SFP. Most PON line cards support four or eight OLT ports. Pfistner says a 1:4 ratio is the sweet spot for initial rollouts but higher ratios are possible.
On the transmit side, the distributed feedback (DFB) laser also goes through a 1:4 stage which introduces a 6dB loss. The laser transmit power is suitably boosted to counter the 6dB loss.
Operators
BT has trialled the optical performance of a transceiver prototype. “BT confirmed that the four outputs each represents a Class B+ GPON OLT output,” says Pfistner. Some half a dozen operators have expressed an interest in the transceiver, ranging from making a request to working with samples.
China is one market where such a design is less relevant at present. That is because China is encouraging through subsidies the rollout of PON OLTs even if the take-up rate is low. Pfistner, quoting an FTTH Council finding, says that there is a 5% penetration typically per year: “Verizon has been deploying PON for six years and has about a 30% penetration.”
Meanwhile, an operator only beginning PON deployments will first typically go after the neighbourhoods where a high take-up rate is likely and only then will it roll out PON in the remaining areas.
After five years, a 25% uptake is achieved, assuming this 5% uptake a year. At a 4x higher split ratio, that is the same bandwidth per user as a standard OLT in a quarter of the area, says NeoPhotonics.
“One big concern that we hear from operators is: Now I'm sharing the [PON OLT] bandwidth with 4x more users,” says Pfistner. “That is true if you believe you will get to the maximum number of users in a short period, but that is hardly ever the case.”
And although the 1:128 split ratio optical transceiver accounts for a small part of the carrier’s PON costs, the saving the MCR transceiver introduces is at the line card level. "That means at some point you are going to save shelves and racks [of equipment],” says Pfistner.
Roadmap
The next development is to introduce an MCR transceiver that meets the 32dB Class C+ specification. “A lot of carriers are about to make the switch from B+ to C+ in the GPON world,” says Pfistner. There will also be more work to reduce the size of the MCR PIC and hence the size of the overall pluggable form factor.
Beyond that, NeoPhotonics says a greater than 4-port split is possible to change the economics of 10 Gigabit PON, for GPON and Ethernet PON. “There are no deployments right now because the economics are not there,” he adds.
“The standards effort is focussed on the 'Olympic thought': higher bandwidth, faster, further reach, mode-coupling receiver (MCR) whereas the carriers focus is: How do I lower the up-front investment to enter the FTTH market?” says Pfistner.
Further reading:
GPON SFP Transceiver with PIC based Mode-Coupled Receiver, Derek Nesset, David Piehler, Kristan Farrow, Neil Parkin, ECOC Technical Digest 2012 paper.
Lightwave: Mode coupling receiver increases PON split ratios, click here
Ovum: Lowering optical transmission cost at ECOC 2012, click here
Summary Gazettabyte stories from ECOC 2012, click here
China and the global PON market
China has become the world's biggest market for passive optical network (PON) technology even though deployments there have barely begun. That is because China, with approximately a quarter of a billion households, dwarfs all other markets. Yet according to market research firm Ovum, only 7% of Chinese homes were connected by year end 2011.
"In 2012, BOSAs [board-based PON optical sub-assemblies] will represent the majority versus optical transceivers for PON ONTs and ONUs"
Julie Kunstler, Ovum
Until recently Japan and South Korea were the dominant markets. And while PON deployments continue in these two markets, the rate of deployments has slowed as these optical access markets mature.
According to Ovum, slightly more than 4 million PON optical line terminals (OLTs) ports, located in the central office, were shipped in Asia Pacific in 2011, of which China accounted for the majority. Worldwide OLT shipments for the same period totaled close to 4.5 million. The fact that in China the ratio of OLT to optical network terminal (ONT), the end terminal at the home or building, deployed is relatively low highlights that in the Chinese market the significant growth in PON end terminals is still to come.
The strength of the Chinese market has helped local system vendors Huawei, ZTE and Fiberhome become leading global PON players, accounting for over 85% of the OLTs sold globally in 2011, says Julie Kunstler, principal analayst, optical components at Ovum. Moreover, around 60% of fibre-to-the-x deployments in Europe, Middle East and Africa were supplied by the Chinese vendors. The strongest non-Chinese vendor is Alcatel-Lucent.
Ovum says that the State Grid China Corporation, the largest electric utility company in China, has begun to deploy EPON for their smart grid trial deployments. PON is preferred to wireless technology because of its perceived ability to secure the data. This raises the prospect of two separate PON lines going to each home. But it remains to be seen, says Kunstler, whether this happens or whether the telcos and utilities share the access network.
"After China the next region that will have meaningful numbers is Eastern Europe, followed by South and Central America and we have already seen it in places like Russia,” says Kunstler. Indeed FTTx deployments in Eastern Europe already exceed those in Western Europe.
EPON and GPON
In China both Ethernet PON (EPON) and Gigabit PON (GPON) are being deployed. Ovum estimates that in 2011, 65% of equipment shipments were EPON while GPON represented 35% GPON in China.
China Telecom was the first of the large operators in China to deploy PON and began with EPON. Ovum is now seeing deployments of GPON and in the 3rd quarter of 2012, GPON OLT deployments have overtaken EPON.
China Mobile, not a landline operator, started deployments later and chose GPON. But these GPON deployments are on top of EPON, says Kunstler: "EPON is still heavily deployed by China Telecom, while China Mobile is doing GPON but it is a much smaller player." Moreover, Chinese PON vendors also supplying OLTs that support EPON and GPON, allowing local decisions to be made as to which PON technology is used.
One trend that is impacting the traditional PON optical transceiver market is the growing use of board-based PON optical sub-assemblies (BOSAs). Such PON optics dispenses with the traditional traditional optical module form factor in the interest of trimming costs.
“A number of the larger, established ODMs [original design manufacturers] have begun to ship BOSA-based PON CPEs,” says Kunstler. In 2012, BOSAs will represent the majority versus optical transceivers for PON ONTs/ONUs.” says Kunstler.
10 Gigabit PON
Ovum says that there has been very few deployments of next generation 10G EPON and XG-PON, the 10 Gigabit version of GPON.
"There have been small amounts of 10G [EPON] in China," says Kunstler. "We are talking hundreds or thousands, not the tens of thousands [of units]."
One reason for this is the relative high cost of 10 Gigabit PON which is still in its infancy. Another is the growing shift to deploy fibre-to-the-home (FTTh) versus fibre-to-the-building deployments in China. 10 Gigabit PON makes more sense in multi-dwelling units where the incoming signal is split between apartments. Moving to 10G EPON boosts the incoming bandwidth by 10x while XG-PON would increase the bandwidth by 4x. "The need for 10 Gig for multi-dwelling units is not as strong as originally thought," says Kunstler.
It is a chicken-and-egg issue with 10G PON, says Kunstler. The price of 10G optics would go down if there was more demand, and if there was more demand, the optical vendors would work on bringing down cost. "10G GPON will happen but will take longer," says Kunstler, with volumes starting to ramp from 2014.
However, Ovum thinks that a stronger market application for 10G PON will be for supporting wireless backhaul. The market research company is seeing early deployments of PON for wireless backhaul especially for small cell sites (e.g. picocells). Small cells are typically deployed in urban areas which is where FTTx is deployed. It is too early to know the market forecast for this application but PON will join the list of communications technologies supporting wireless backhaul.
Challenges
Despite the huge expected growth in deployments, driven by China, challenges remain for PON optical transceiver and chip vendors.
The margins on optics and PON silicon continue to be squeezed. ODMs using BOSAs are putting pricing pressure on PON transceiver costs while the vertical integration strategy of system vendors such as Huawei, which also develops some of its own components squeezes, out various independent players. Huawei has its own silicon arm called HiSilicon and its activities in PON has impacted the chip opportunity of the PON merchant suppliers.
"Depending upon who the customer is, depending upon the pricing, depending on the features and the functions, Huawei will make the decision whether they are using HiSilicon or whether they are using merchant silicon from an independent vendor, for example," says Kunstler.
There has been consolidation in the PON chip space as well as several new players. For example, Broadcom acquired Teknouvs and Broadlight while Atheros acquired Opulan and Atheros was then acquired by Qualcomm. Marvell acquired a very small start-up and is now competing with Atheros and Broadcom. Most recently, Realtek is rumored to have a very low-cost PON chip.
2012: A year of unique change
The third and final part on what CEOs, executives and industry analysts expect during the new year, and their reflections on 2011.
Karen Liu, principal analyst, components telecoms, Ovum @girlgeekanalyst
"We’ve entered the next decade for real: the mobile world is unified around LTE and moving to LTE Advanced, complete with small cells and heterogenous networks including Wi-Fi."
Last year was a long one. Looking back, it is hard to believe that only one year has elapsed between January 2011 and now.
In fact, looking back it is hard to remember how things looked a year ago: natural disasters were considered rare occurrences. WiMAX’s role was still being discussed, some viewed TDD LTE as a Chinese peculiarity. For that matter, cloud-RAN was another weird Chinese idea. But no matter, China could do anything given its immunity to economics and need for a return-on-investment.
Femtocells were consumer electronics for the occasional indoor coverage fix, and Wi-Fi was not for carriers.
Only optical could do 100Mbps to the subscriber, who, by the way, was moving on to 10 Gig PON in short order. Flexible spectrum ROADMS meant only Finisar could play, and high port-count wavelength-selective switches had come and gone. 100 Gigabit DWDM took several slots, hadn’t shipped for real, and even the client-side interface was a problem.
As for modules, 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) client was CFP-sized, and high-density 100GbE looked so far away that the non-standard 10x10 MSA was welcomed.
NeoPhotonics was a private company, doing that wacky planar integration thing that works OK for passives but not actives.
Now it feels like we’ve entered the next decade for real: the mobile world is unified around LTE and moving to LTE Advanced, complete with small cells and heterogenous networks including Wi-Fi.
Optical is one of several ways to do backhaul or PC peripherals. 40GbE, even single-mode, comes in a QSFP package, tunable comes in an SFP — both of which, by the way, use optical integration.
Most optical transport vendors, even metro specialists, have 100 Gigabit coherent in trial stage at least. Thousands of 100 Gig ports and tens of thousands of 40 Gig have shipped.
Flexible spectrum is being standardised and CoAdna went public. The tunable laser start-up phase concluded with Santur finding a home in NeoPhotonics, now a public company.
But we also have a new feeling of vulnerability.
Optical components revenues and margins slid back down. Bad luck can strike twice, with Opnext taking the hit from both the spring earthquake and the fall floods. China turns out not to be immune after all, and time hasn’t automatically healed Europe.
What will happen this year? At this rate, I think we’ll see a lot of news at OFC in a couple of months' time. By then I’ll probably think: "Was it as recently as January when the world looked so different?"
Brian Protiva, CEO of ADVA Optical Networking @ADVAOpticalNews
Last year was an incredible year for networks. In many respects it was a watershed moment. Optical transport took a huge step forward with the genuine availability of 100 Gigabit technologies.
What's even more incredible is that 100 Gigabit emerged in more than the core: we saw 100 Gig metro solutions enter the marketplace. This means that for the first time enterprises and service providers have the opportunity to deploy 100 Gig solutions that fit their needs. Thanks to the development of direct-detection 100 Gig technology, cost is becoming less and less of an issue. This is a game changer.
In 2012, 100 Gig deployments will continue to be a key topic, with more available choices and maturing systems. However, I firmly believe the central focus of 2012 will be automation and multi-layer network intelligence.
"We need to see networks that can effectively govern and optimise themselves."
Talking to our customers and the industry, it is clear that more needs to be done to develop true network automation. There are very few companies that have successfully addressed this issue.
We need to see networks that can effectively govern and optimise themselves. That can automatically deliver bandwidth on demand, monitor and resolve problems before they become service disrupting, and drive dramatically increased efficiency.
The future of our networks is all about simplicity. The continued fierce bandwidth growth can no longer be supported by today's complex operational inefficiencies. Streamlined operations are essential if operators are to drive for further profitable growth.
I'm excited about helping to make this happen.
Arie Melamed, head of marketing, ECI Telecom @ecitelecom
The existing momentum of major traffic growth with no proportional revenue increase has continued - even intensified - in 2011. This means that operators have to invest in their networks without being able to generate the proportional revenue increase from this investment. We expect to see new business models crop up as operators cope with over-the-top (OTT) services.
To differentiate themselves from competition, operators must make the network a core part of the end-customer experience. To do so, we expect operators to introduce application-awareness in the network – optimising service delivery to avoid network expansions and introduce new revenues.
We also expect operators to offer quality-of-service assurance to end users and content application providers, turning a lose-lose situation around.
Larry Schwerin, CEO of Capella Intelligent Subsystems @CapellaPhotonic
Over 2011, we witnessed the demand for broadband access increase at an accelerated rate. Much of this has been fueled by the continuation of mass deployments of broadband access - PON/FTTH, wireless LTE, HFC, to name a few - as well as the ever-increasing implementation of cloud computing, requiring instantaneous broadband access. Video and rich media are a small but growing piece of this equation.
The ultimate of this is yet to be felt, as people start to draw more narrowcast versus broadcast content. The final element will be when upstream content via appliances similar to Sling Media, as well as the various forms of video conferencing, become more widespread. This will lead to more symmetrical bandwidth from an upstream perspective.
'Change is definitely in order for the optical ecosystem. The question is how and when?'
Along with this, the issue of falling revenue-per-bit is forcing network operators to develop more cost-effective ways for managing this traffic.
All of aforementioned is driving demand for higher capacity and more flexible support at the fundamental optical layer.
I believe this will work to translate into more bits-per-wavelength, more wavelengths-per-fibre, and finally more flexibility for network operators. They will be able to more easily manage the traffic at the optical layer. This points to good news for transponder, tunable and ROADM/ WSS suppliers.
2011 also pointed out certain issues within the optical communications sector. Most notably, entering 2011, the financial marketplace was bullish on the optical sector following rapid quarter-on-quarter growth of certain larger optical players. Then, the “Ides of March” came and optical stocks lost as much as 40% of their value when it was deemed there was a pull back in demand by a very few, but nonetheless important players in the sector.
Later in the year came the flooding in Thailand, which hampered the production capabilities of many of the optical components players.
Overall margins in the sector remain at unacceptable levels furthering the speculation that things need to change in order for a more robust environment to exist.
What will 2012 bring?
I believe demand for bandwidth will continue to grow. Data centres will gain more focus as cloud computing continues to gain traction. This will lead to more demand for fundamental technologies in the area of optical transmission and management.
The next phase of wavelength management solutions will start to emerge - both at the high port count (1x20) as well as low-port count (1x2, 1x4) for edge applications. More emphasis will be placed on monitoring and control as more complex optical networks are built.
Change is definitely in order for the optical ecosystem. The question is how and when? Will it simply be consolidation? How will vertical integration take shape? How will new technologies influence potential outcomes?
2012 should be a year of unique change.
Terry Unter, president and general manager, optical networks solutions, Oclaro
Discussion and progress on defining next-generation ROADM network architectures was a very important development in 2011. In particular, consensus on feature requirements and technology choices to enable a more cost-efficient optical network layer was generally agreed amongst the major network equipment manufacturers. Colourless, directionless and, to a significant degree, contentionless are clear goals, while we continue to drive down the cost of the network.
"We expect to see a host of system manufacturers making decisions on 100 Gig supply partners. This should be an exciting year."
Coherent detection transponder technology is a critical piece of the puzzle ensuring scalability of network capacity while leveraging a common technology platform. We succeeded in volume production shipments of a 40 Gig coherent transponder and we announced our 100 Gig transponder.
2012 will be an important year for 100 Gig. The availability of 100 Gig transponder modules for deployment will enable a much wider list of system manufacturers to offer their customers more spectrally-efficient network solutions. The interest is universal from metro applications to the long haul and ultra-long haul market segments.
While there is much discussion about 400 Gig and higher rates, standards are in very early stages. The industry as a whole expects 100 Gig to be a key line rate for several years.
As we enter 2012, we expect to see a host of system manufacturers making decisions on 100 Gig supply partners. This should be an exciting year.
For Part 1, click here
For Part 2, click here