ECOC '22 Reflections - Final Part
Gazettabyte has been asking industry and academic figures for their thoughts after attending ECOC 2022, held last month in Basel, Switzerland. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned, and what, if anything, surprised them.
In the final part, Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi of Coherent, Acacia’s Tom Williams, ADVA’s Jörg-Peter Elbers and Fabio Pittalà of Keysight Technologies share their thoughts.
Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi, Chief Marketing Officer, Coherent
The ECOC event represents an excellent opportunity for us – a vertically-integrated manufacturer selling at all levels of the value chain – to meet with customers, end-customers and partners/ suppliers.
There was a refreshing sense of optimism and excitement for optical communications, driven by relentless bandwidth growth, despite the macroeconomic backdrop.
The roadmap for optical transceivers is dictated by the electrical interface used for Ethernet switch chips. We have seen that play out yet again for 100-gigabit electrical lanes used for 25-terabit and 50-terabit Ethernet switches.
Several transceiver suppliers demonstrated products with 100 gigabit-per-lane electrical interfaces in quad and octal form factors. The optical lane of a transceiver typically begins at the same speed as the electrical lane and then progresses to a faster rate. This transition should be expected for 800-gigabit transceivers as well.
While 100 gigabit-per-lane transceivers, such as the 800G-DR8 and the 2x400G-FR4 devices, there were devices demonstrated that enable the transition to optical 200-gigabit lanes. It was satisfying to see a warm response for the demonstration of Coherent’s 200-gigabit electro-absorption modulated laser (EML) and Semtech’s 200-gigabit EML driver. I am confident that direct detection will play a predominant role in 800-gigabit and 1.6-terabit data centre links.
Despite the great interest in co-packaged optics, nearly all the working demonstrations at the show used pluggable transceiver modules. Industry colleagues are preparing for pluggable transceiver modules using the next 200-gigabit electrical interface. Indeed, at ECOC, there was an OIF-CEI 224G demo by Keysight and Synopsys.
One key topic at the show concerned whether ‘coherent lite’ or direct detect is the preferred solution for data centres and edge aggregation. The debate remains open and no one solution fits all. It will depend on the specific application and architecture. A broad portfolio supported by different technology platforms frees you to select the best approach to serve the customer’s needs.
I saw the industry responding to the need for disaggregation and innovative solutions for access and telecom. Coherent’s 100G ZR announcement is one such example, as well as the extra performance of high-power 400ZR+ coherent transceivers.
We started this trend and we now see others announcing similar solutions.
Arista’s demo, which featured 400ZR connections over a 120km data centre interconnect (DCI) link, enabled by our pluggable optical line system in a QSFP form factor, received much attention and interest.
Tom Williams, Senior Director of Marketing for Acacia, now part of Cisco.
Many of us are still of a mindset where any opportunity to get together and see industry friends and colleagues is a great show.
My focus is very much on the success of 400-gigabit pluggable coherent solutions.
We’ve been talking about these products for a long time, back to the initial OIF 400ZR project starting in late 2016. Since then, 400ZR/ZR+ has been a hot topic at every conference.
The commercial success of these solutions, and the impact that they’re having on network architectures, has been gratifying. These products have ramped in volumes not seen by any previous coherent technology.
The industry has done a great job at 400 gigabits, striking the right balance of power and performance. Now, we’re looking at 800 gigabits and working through some of the same questions. Discussions around 1.6 terabits have even started.
Much work is still required but what we heard from customers at ECOC is that the trend toward pluggable coherent will likely continue.
Jörg-Peter Elbers, Senior Vice President, Advanced Technology, Standards and IPR at ADVA
‘Never say never’ captures well ECOC’s content. There was no one groundbreaking idea but topics discussed in the past are back on the agenda, either because of a need or the technology has progressed.
Here are several of my ECOC takeaways:
- The 130 gigabaud (GBd) class of coherent optics is coming, and the generation after that – 240GBd – is on the horizon.
- Coherent optics continue to push towards the edge. Will there be a Very-High Speed Coherent PON after 50G High-Speed PON?
- Whether co-packaged optics or front-pluggable modules, electro-photonic integration is rapidly advancing with some interesting industry insights shared at the conference.
- Quantum-safe communication is becoming part of the regular conference program.
- Optical Satcom is gaining traction. Optical ground-to-space links are promising yet challenging.
Fabio Pittalà, Product Planner, Broadband and Photonics – Center of Excellence, Keysight Technologies
This was my first ECOC as an employee of Keysight. I spent most of my time at the exhibition introducing the new high-speed Keysight M8199B Arbitrary Waveform Generator.
There were a lot of discussions focusing on technologies enabling the next Ethernet rates. There is a debate about intensity-modulation direct detection (IMDD) versus coherent but also what modulation format, symbol rate or degree of parallelisation.
While the industry is figuring out the best solution, researchers achieved important milestones by transmitting the highest symbol rate and the highest net bitrate.
Nokia Bell-Labs demonstrated record-breaking transmission of 260-gigabaud dual-polarisation quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) over 100km single-mode fibre.
Meanwhile, NTT broke the net bitrate record by transmitting more than 2 terabit-per-second using a probabilistic-constellation-shaped dual-polarisation quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-QAM) over different data centre links.
ADVA targets access with its latest pluggable module
- The 25 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) SFP28 is self-tuning and has a reach of 40km
- ADVA’s CEO, Christoph Glingener, in his plenary talk at ECOC 2022 addressed the unpredictable nature of technology adoption.
ADVA has expanded its portfolio of optical modules with an SFP28 for the access market.
The AccessWave25 is a self-tuning dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) pluggable.
The SFP28 is designed to enable communications service providers to straightforwardly upgrade their access networks from 10Gbps to 25Gbps.
ADVA made the announcement just before ECOC 2022.
Features
The SFP28 module links switches and routers to DWDM open-line systems (see diagram below).
The 40km-reach pluggable uses 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) and supports 25 gigabit Ethernet and eCPRI traffic.
The module uses the G.metro self-tuning standard to coordinate with the remote-end transceiver a chosen channel in the C-band, simplifying configuration and removing human error.
The G.metro communication channel also enables remote monitoring of the module.
The SFP28 consumes 3W and works over the extended temperature of -40 to 85oC.
Strategy
ADVA says vertical integration is a critical part of its Optical Engine unit’s strategy.
Saeid Aramideh, ADVA’s Optical Engine’s vice president of business development, says the unit focusses on such technology disciplines as silicon photonics, laser technology and digital signal processing.
The digital signal processing includes aggregation as with ADVA‘s MicroMux module products, PAM-4 used by the AccessWave25, and coherent as with its 100ZR module announced in June.
Advanced packaging is another technology area of interest.
“These are the fundamental innovation areas we focus on,” says Aramideh. “We build our product portfolio based on these platforms.”
ADVA also looks at the market to identify product gaps.
“Not so much every MSA module, but what is happening on the aggregation side,” says Aramideh. “What is it that other people are not paying attention to?”
This is what motivated ADVA’s MicroMux products. The MicroMux module family includes a 10-by-10 gigabit going into 100 gigabits, a 10-by-one gigabit into 10 gigabits, and a four-by-100 gigabit going into 400 gigabits.
“The reality is over 10,000 MicroMux modules are carrying traffic with a top tier-one network provider in Europe,“ says Aramideh. “Not on ADVA equipment but on other network equipment maker, which we haven’t made public.”
For access aggregation, ADVA unveiled at OFC its four-by-10 gigabit MicroMux Edge BiDi with a 40km reach.
“This is for Ethernet, backhaul, and services where fibre is limited and symmetric latency is important,” says Aramideh.
ADVA’s 100ZR module uses a coherent digital signal processor (DSP) developed with Coherent. The 100ZR is a QSFP28 module that dissipates 5W and reaches 300km.
Now, ADVA has added the AccessWave25, a tunable SFP28 that uses direct-detect technology and PAM-4, including ADVA’s IP for distance optimisation.
“The AccessWave25 works on legacy, so if you have a 10-gigabit network, you don’t have to change anything on the physical layer,” he says.
ADVA also looks at metro applications and says it will announce lower-power, smaller form factor coherent designs.
ECOC plenary talk
The CEO of ADVA, Christoph Glingener, gave a plenary talk at ECOC.
Entitled Never say never, Glingener reflected on technology adoption and its timing.
He pointed out how technologies that, at first, seem impractical or too difficult to adopt can subsequently become mainstream. He cited coherent optical communication as one example.
Glingener also discussed how such unpredictability impacts business, citing supply-chain issues, the global pandemic, and sovereignty.
Sovereignty and the influx of government capital for fibre rollout and semiconductors confirm that the optical communications industry is in a good place. But Glingener worries how the industry’s practitioners are ageing and stresses more needs to be done to attract graduates.
Tracing optical communications’ progress, he talked about the 15-year cycles of first direct detect and then fibre amplification. Coherent then followed in 2010.
The industry is thus ripe for breakthrough technology.
Reaching limits
Shannon’s limit means spectral efficiency no longer improves while Moore’s law’s demise continues. Near-term trends are clear, he says, parallelism, whether it is multiple spectrum bands, multiple fibres, or multiple fibre cores. This, in turn, will drive new optical amplifier and wavelength-selective switch designs.
Further optimisation will be needed, integration at the device level and the creation of denser systems. Network automation is also essential and that requires much work.
Glingener also argues for optical bypass rather than electrical packet processing. Large core routers overseeing routing at the IP and optical layer will not aid the greening of the internet.
Next wave
So what is the next technology wave?
Possibilities he cited include hollow-core fibre, photonic computing, and quantum entanglement for communications and the quantum internet.
Will they reach a large scale? Glingener is doubtful.
Whatever the technology proves to be, he said, it is likely already being discussed at ECOC 2022.
If he has a message for the audience, it is to apply their own filter whenever they hear people say, ‘it will never come,’ or ‘it is too difficult.’ Never say never, says Glingener.
ADVA and II-VI’s coherent partnership
- ADVA and II-VI have jointly developed a 100-gigabit coherent DSP
- Both companies plan to use the 2.0-2.5W, 7nm CMOS Steelerton DSP for a 100ZR QSFP28 module
- II-VI’s ASIC design team engineered the DSP while ADVA developed the silicon photonics-based optics.
ADVA and II-VI have joined forces to define a tiny coherent digital signal processor (DSP) that fits inside a QSFP28 optical module.
The Steelerton DSP can send a 100-gigabit dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) transmission over 80-120km, carrying wireless backhaul and access traffic.
“It is backhaul of broadband, it is backhaul of mobile, and it definitely moves outdoors,” says Christoph Glingener, CTO at ADVA.
The module also serves metro networks with its 300km reach using optical amplification.
II-VI and ADVA now join such established coherent players as Ciena, Huawei, Infinera, Nokia as well as Marvell, NEL, and Acacia, now part of Cisco.
Effect Photonics announced at OFC earlier this year its coherent market entry with its acquisition of the Viasat DSP team.
Motivation
ADVA says it entered the coherent DSP market after failing to find a design suited for backhaul, a coherent market that promises highest unit volumes.
Backhaul has become even more important market for ADVA given its merger with broadband equipment maker ADTRAN.
II-VI also notes how access rates are moving from 10 to 100 gigabits.
“We were looking to develop a DSP capable to target a market that is underserved and where we can differentiate. This analysis led us to the 100ZR with a purpose-built DSP solution” says John DeMott, vice president product management, coherent and tunable product lines at II-VI.
The 100-gigabit coherent market for access contrasts with 400-gigabit coherent that uses modules such as 400ZR and 400ZR+ to connect data centres.
ADVA did consider existing suppliers’ coherent DSPs but deemed them too big and power-hungry for this application. This is what led to the II-VI partnership.
“We found a partner in II-VI that was willing to do this, but to get to the required power envelopes, we needed a 7nm DSP,” says Glingener. “And 7nm CMOS technology is not cheap.“
II-VI has a staff of mixed-signal and ASIC engineers in Germany that designed the Steelerton chip.
The two firms now have their own 100-gigabit DSP and can start developing coherent product roadmaps.
Applications
The 100ZR module will be deployed at aggregation sites.
ADVA shows how the 100ZR module is used for edge aggregation (see diagram).
Another application is 100-gigabit data-centre interconnect (DCI) for enterprises; hyperscalers require 400 gigabit and higher rates for DCI.
II-VI says the DSP is suited for access and metro applications. The 100ZR module fits a wavelength in a 50GHz channel to enable 96 DWDM wavelengths across the C-band. The 100ZR module has a maximum reach of 300km when used with amplification.
“The 22dB loss budget supports up to 80km without in-line amplification and up to 300km with in-line amplification, limited by chromatic dispersion,” says DeMott.
II-VI highlights several use-cases for the 100ZR module.
One is IP-over-DWDM, connecting edge routers to an aggregation router (see diagram) or a muxponder. The aggregated 100-gigabit wavelengths are sent to a metro router using a 400-gigabit 400ZR+ coherent module. II-VI also has 400ZR+ modules.
Two factors dictate the 100ZR module design: power consumption and the form factor.
Even a module power consumption of 10W is too high for access. Also, the DSP and optics must fit inside a QSFP28 since this is a common form factor for access equipment uplinks.
The resulting DSP has a power consumption of 2.0-2.5W and the chip is a fifth the size of other 7nm coherent DSPs. The 100ZR QSFP28 module – the DSP and optics – consumes 5.0-5.5W.
The DSP is stripped down to its essential features to achieve the power target. For example, the DSP uses one modulation format only: dual-polarisation, quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK).
“You de-feature the DSP down to a level that you can meet the power envelope, and it is not that complicated anymore,” says Glingener.
ADVA developed the silicon photonics analogue front end for the module that uses a single laser. To fit the DSP and the optics in a QSFP28 also proved an integration challenge.
The Steelerton DSP is taped out and both companies expect to have 100ZR prototype modules in the second half of this year.
What next
ADVA is planning a 100ZR+ module that will have enhanced optical performance that will be available in prototype form in early 2023.
ADVA’s coherent module interest remains broadband. Possible developments include a 5nm CMOS 200-gigabit DSP or a cheaper, more power-efficient, second-generation 100-gigabit design.
ADVA is also exploring concepts such as a parallel design, a 4x100G implementation.
Meanwhile, II-VI is looking at high-end coherent designs, which may include multiple sources for silicon photonics
“The next obvious steps are 800 gigabits and 1.6 terabits,” says DeMott. “There is a lot of [industry] activity, so those would be directions we’re considering.” II-VI has in-house optics for high-end coherent designs.
There will be a market for 800-gigabit coherent modules, says DeMott, but hyperscalers already are asking for 1.6-terabit designs.
“These are divergent DSPs,” says DeMott. “You can’t do a DSP that does 1.6 terabits, 800 gigabits and 400 gigabits; it’s either a 1.6-terabit or a 400/ 800-gigabit DSP design.”
ADVA Optical Engines adds bidirectional multiplexing
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ADVA expands its multiplexing modules to include the network edge
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The company is developing optical modules as part of a three-pillar business strategy
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ADVA’s merger with ADTRAN is approaching its conclusion
ADVA has expanded its family of multiplexing optical modules with a 40km bidirectional design for access networks.
Until now, ADVA’s three multiplexer optical module products have focussed on IP routing and switching.
The multiplexing modules combine lower-speed optical interfaces into a higher-speed port.
The company unveiled its 4-by-10-gigabit MicroMux Edge BiDi, its first multiplexer module for the network edge, at the OFC show held in March in San Diego.
ADVA Optical Engines
As the capacity of switching and routing equipment increases, so does the speed of the electrical serialiser/ deserialiser (serdes) interface. What was at 10 gigabits is now at 50 and 100 gigabits. Yet legacy 1-gigabit and 10-gigabit streams remain.
“You need to find a way to support these legacy services while your network capacity goes up,” says Saeid Aramideh, vice president of business development at Optical Engines, ADVA. “So you need a multiplexing solution.”
Aramideh joined ADVA after working at firms CoreOptics, acquired by Cisco Systems in 2010, and then Ranovus. He mentions how, at an analyst presentation day, the CEO of ADVA, Brian Protiva, detailed three focus areas: entering non-telecom markets, software services, and becoming a more vertically integrated company.
“That includes differentiated products, products that don’t exist in the industry, based on ADVA’s IP (intellectual property),” says Aramideh.
The IP covers lasers, silicon photonics, software, and integration. ADVA aims to make industry solutions that customers can’t get elsewhere.
ADVA will also make products that do exist in the marketplace in order to ensure security of supply for its customers while enabling ADVA to reduce its product costs.
“That is the spirit of the business unit that we call ADVA Optical Engines,” says Aramideh.
MicroMux product family
The advantage of fitting the multiplexing within a module is that there is no need for additional networking equipment or a multiplexing line card.
“There is nothing as good as a module that does muxing because the solution has zero-footprint,” says Aramideh. “There is a network element already there; just plug the module in and do the muxing.”
ADVA’s first multiplexing module product is the MicroMux, a 10-by-10-gigabit QSFP28 optical interface feeding into a 100-gigabit port.
The MicroMux has multi-mode and 10km single-mode variants. “Over 10,000 units are in deployment with probably one of the largest IP router companies out there, carrying traffic in the network,” says Aramideh.
ADVA has also developed the MicroMux Nano, a 10-by-1-gigabit design in an SFP+ pluggable that supports single-mode and multi-mode fibre.
The MicroMux Quattro addresses 400 gigabits. Here, a QSFP-DD module multiplexes four 100-gigabit optical streams.
As well as the -SR4 interface, the Quattro multiplexes 100-gigabit CWDM-4 and LR4. “Those are the two categories that don’t exist in the marketplace, so the product is unique,” says Aramideh.
MicroMux Edge BiDi
At OFC, ADVA announced its first access product, the 4-by-10-gigabit MicroMux Edge BiDi with a 40km reach, to address fixed and wireless traffic for consumers and enterprises.
One fibre sends and receives data in a bidirectional (BiDi) design. Data is transmitted using two wavelengths: 1270nm and 1330nm. Bidirectional communication benefits areas of the network where fibre is scarce.
The Micromux Edge Bidi supports four individual 10-gigabit optical channels multiplexed in the QSFP+ module, a single fibre carrying each stream.
An example application is sending 10-gigabit traffic between a wireless antenna site to a central office. “This is one connection on a single fibre, and four fibres are coming into the module,” says Aramideh.
Another benefit of using fibre for two-way communications is that latency is symmetrical.
This benefits applications where avoiding added latency is essential.
Mobile networks, especially in the fronthaul, need precise timing references for the radio heads for coordinated multi-point solutions. If the signals up and down travel on the same fiber, the dynamic delay variations are fewer. CIPRI fronthaul, for example, requires nanosecond accuracy and a single fibre is a solution of choice.
“As you start going into more enterprise applications, this becomes more and more important,” says Aramideh. “Some applications are susceptible to this.”
ADVA says one carrier customer for its edge multiplexer will start deployments this year.
Optical component innovation
The multiplexing products use ADVA’s vertical integration IP including laser and IC technologies.
ADVA has developed a multi-link gearbox chip based on OIF standards, for example, to enable aggregation of lower-speed data rates.
“We are working with a partner on the packaging capabilities to reduce that massive number of lasers and detectors into small form factors,” says Aramideh. “So there is a lot of innovation from an optical components perspective.”
ADTRAN merger
ADTRAN and ADVA announced their intention to merge in August last year.
Adtran’s shareholders have since approved the deal as have ADVA’s.
The deal has also gained UK approval and now requires the same in Germany.
Α closing date will then be set.
Books read in 2021: Part 3
In Part III, two more industry figures pick their reads of the year: Dana Cooperson of Blue Heliotrope Research and ADVA’s Gareth Spence.
My reading traverses different ground from that of other invited analysts to this yearly section. In addition, my ‘avoid new releases’ approach means my picks are not from 2021. And before jumping straight into recommendations, I’ll preface my comments with an homage to communal aspects of reading that have meant so much to me, especially during these two Covid years.
My two book groups managed to meet steadily during the pandemic, sometimes while sitting outside in the snow, covered with blankets and sipping hot tea.
Beyond ensuring a steady stream of titles to read and discuss, the ladies in my book clubs have supported and encouraged each other through births and deaths and all the highs and lows in between. I tried a third, online alumni book club, this year, but meh: what it provided was not even close to the tight-knit book club experience I treasure.
I have also appreciated the annual August in-person ad hoc book club and reading recommendations sessions that grew out of my college experience, and which have been going strong for 40 years now. My daughters and I also exchanged books and discussed them this last year.
The books I most appreciated of the 20 or so I read in 2021 were those that offered interesting, deep, and well-written windows into people, places, cultures, and identities I didn’t know I needed to know more about. Here are my top picks:
My favourite 2021 read was the 2019 Booker Prize winner Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo. This funny and touching novel spans space and time to weave the stories of twelve mostly female, mostly Black, and mostly British characters and their ancestors. The characters’ narratives intersect in surprising ways that don’t feel at all artificial or manipulative. The book’s unique style and structure add to the storytelling.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, is a fantastic autobiographical novel published in 1943. It details the hard yet full life of Frances Nolan, who grows up impoverished in Williamsburg to first-generation parents from immigrant families (one Irish, one Austrian) in the early 20th century. The descriptions are so vivid, and the main character so tenacious, determined, and smart, that the book is positive and affirming despite its often tough subject matter (alcoholism, abuse, poverty).
My daughter, who had taken an Asian-American literature class in college, suggested The Sympathizer, a 2016 Pulitzer winner by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Like “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” the subject matter (the fall of Saigon, spying, torture, betrayal, being a stranger in a strange land) is not a simple read. But the characters are again so vivid, the narrative so darkly comic and satirical, and the historic subject matter so relevant to today that I found the book riveting. (Note: Nguyen published a sequel in 2021 that I’ve yet to read.)
American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins, tells the harrowing tale of a group of desperate migrants trying to complete the dangerous trip from Latin America to the US. As I started reading it, a friend who hadn’t read it noted the controversies swirling around the author (she’s not Latinx enough for some) and the plot (lambasted by some as ‘immigrant porn’). Whatever: I read the book and loved it. This gripping novel made the plight of desperate migrants more real to me than any news story had done.
Other book recommendations:
• The Vanishing Half: A Novel by Britt Bennett, regards two African American sisters from the US South who make very different choices (one passes as white) and how their futures and families are affected by their choices.
• Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez, concerns a retired English professor who is suddenly widowed and trying to figure out how to live her life and deal with her three sister
• The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai, is about the AIDS crisis in Chicago. It bounces between 1985 and 2015 as it follows a group of gay men and their born and made families. I found the plot (who lives, who dies) a tad manipulative, but the book shined a light on a pandemic and its victims that we should never forget.
• The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton, which is set in 17th century Amsterdam, is an atmospheric, magical, and suspenseful novel that made the era of the Dutch East India Company come alive for me. You did not want to be poor, female, Black, or gay in 1686 in the Netherlands, so this book is dark.
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story, a non-fiction novel by journalist John Berendt, describes a 1980s murder and trial in Savannah, Georgia. Readers will not easily forget the town’s many characters, especially The Lady Chablis.
It seems fitting to end my 2021 recommendations with a recent read, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a young man whose moral decay and debauchery is recorded by his painted portrait even while his body retains its unsullied youth and beauty.
Wilde sure had a way with words: his descriptions of 19th century London high society are as sharp as any knife. For example, Lord Fermor was “a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him.”
I’ll close with Wilde’s musing on art from the last epigram in the novel’s preface: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
Gareth Spence, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Public Relations at ADVA.
It’s been a grey and wet holiday season in the UK. Ideal conditions for hunkering down in front of the fire and building a reading list for 2022. If you’re doing the same, here are two suggestions for your book pile.
Both recommendations can loosely be filed under the topic of the American Dream. The first one stretches the rules as it’s only available as an audiobook. It’s Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam.
I was reluctant to listen to this book. I’ve grown tired of Gladwell’s writing style and his tendency to reduce human nature to a digestible catchphrase. Still, the opportunity to hear Simon talk about his career proved too compelling.
As a child, I was an avid listener of Simon. His work shaped my early notions of America and the American Dream. In the book, Simon talks extensively about his anthemic tunes. Where the ideas came from, how the songs were shaped and how his relationship with his music has changed during his long career.
It’s fascinating to hear Simon talk openly about his past. If you have any interest in his songs or the musical process, you’ll enjoy this book. Just try your best to overcome Gladwell’s gushing praise of Simon. The man could rob a bank and Gladwell would find artistic merit in it.
My second recommendation is Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder. This book is a powerful exploration of the flipside of the American Dream. It follows the lives of a growing community of people who have been cast aside by society and forced to find ways to live outside mainstream America.
Many of the people detailed are over 60 and have lost their homes and livelihoods. They now live in recreational vehicles, vans and even cars and spend their time in laborious, menial jobs. When they’re not working, they’re travelling the country, finding ways to embrace freedoms they never had before.
It’s sobering to read Bruder’s book as she spends over a year exploring this nomadic community. It’s hard to imagine that this group won’t continue to expand as life in America becomes ever more challenging.
But as difficult as it is to read, there’s also hope. The people show resourcefulness and resiliency in how they discover a new way to live and rediscover their country.
ADTRAN-ADVA's metro-access play
ADTRAN and ADVA have agreed to merge after a long courtship.
The two CEOs have spoken regularly over the years but several developments spurred them to act.
The merger combines ADTRAN’s expertise in access technologies with ADVA’s metro wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) know-how to create a ‘metro-core-to-door’ company with revenues of $1.2 billion.
ADTRAN and ADVA a better path forward together than separately
As such, the merger promises to double their size and networking skills. Yet the stock market appeared underwhelmed by the announcement, with ADTRAN’s shares down 16% for the rest of the week after the deal was announced.
Market research analysts, however, are more upbeat.
“ADTRAN and ADVA have a better path forward together than separately,” said John Lively, principal analyst at LightCounting Market Research, in a research note.
The deal is expected to close in the second or third quarter of 2022 but only after several hurdles are overcome in what is described as a complex deal.
Motivation
The two companies describe the merger as a logical outcome given recent developments in the marketplace.
“Our combination will make us one of the largest Western suppliers for the markets we serve,” said Tom Stanton, CEO and chairman of ADTRAN, on the call announcing the deal. The word “Western” is noteworthy, reflecting how geopolitics is one catalyst motivating the merger.
The deal will also reposition the two companies with their rivals. ADTRAN will distance itself from broadband competitors such as Calix while ADVA will diversify its business from its current larger competitors, Ciena and Infinera. The new company’s revenues will also approach those of the two players.
The product portfolios of ADTRAN and ADVA have almost no overlap. ADTRAN offers fibre access and connectivity solutions while ADVA addresses metro WDM, data centre interconnect, business Ethernet, network synchronisation and network functions virtualisation (NFV) expertise.
Once combined, each company will seek to expand its sales in the other’s main market.
The US accounts for 74 per cent of ADTRAN’s revenues, while Europe accounts for 21 per cent. Meanwhile, Europe accounts for 62 per cent of ADVA’s business while the US is 29 per cent. The remaining revenues come from the Asia Pacific: ADTRAN, 5 per cent, and ADVA, 9 per cent.
Also cited as a factor is the wave of investment in fibre, not just by communications service providers (CSPs) and public utilities but also government-backed stimulus plans in the US and Europe.
In the US, $66 billion in investment was mentioned spread across programmes such as the infrastructure bill, the second phase of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), and state-level funding for high-speed broadband.
In Europe, the sum is similar: $35 billion in government funding for high-speed broadband in the European Union, and $30 billion in public and private funding for fibre builds in the UK alone.
“There is an ongoing global fibre investment opportunity that we believe will create sustained momentum for years to come,” said Stanton.
Moreover, having access and second-mile technologies, the new company can better win business. “There is not a customer that we sell to today that, when they are upgrading their access infrastructure, is not also upgrading their middle-mile,” said Stanton.
Becoming a larger player will help, he said: “We see our customers making a significant capital investment to transition their supply chain to trusted vendors.”
Another merger catalyst is the opportunity created by US and European service providers that no longer use Chinese vendors and in some cases are replacing equipment already deployed.
In the US, this is less of an issue due to the fewer deployments while in Europe the process started 18 months ago. Stanton expects Latin America to follow.
“The market opportunity is not just created by all the stimulus but it is also because of the displacement of Eastern vendors,” said Stanton.
There is a land grab going on, he says, and the company that gets there first wins.
“Once you get entrenched in a carrier, regardless of size – the larger ones tend to have two [vendors] and the smaller ones, one – once you are entrenched, it is very difficult to get pulled out,” said Stanton.
Analysis
LightCounting’s view of the merger is positive.
Lively says the merger will not reshape the optical networking industry but it will be attractive to Tier 2 and Tier 3 CSPs that want to buy access and aggregation equipment from a single supplier.
LightCounting notes that the deal values ADVA at $931 million, 1.3x its most recent four quarters of sales.
This is a relatively low valuation: the 2015 Infinera-Transmode merger was 2.6x while the Cisco-Acacia Communications deal, which closed earlier this year, was 7.7x. Of recent deals, only the 2020 Ribbon-ECI Telecom deal was lower, at 1.2x.
LightCounting says one reason for the lower valuation could be ADVA’s port shipments; the vendor is one of the smallest dense WDM suppliers.
The merger’s impact will mostly be felt by the competitors of the existing two companies, says Lively. The new ADTRAN’s sales will be 20 per cent greater than Infinera but still a third of the size of Fiberhome and Ciena.
The importance of size is something both companies stress.
“Our industry has been consolidating and there is an underlying notion that scale matters,” says Stephan Rettenberger, senior vice president, marketing and investor relations at ADVA.
Doubling in size, the new company will be in the same bracket as Infinera while Ciena will be about 3x its size, notes Rettenberger: “The companies that we used to worry about the most are not as distant as before.”
At first glance, the merger between a US and an European company raises questions about the integration challenge. But both firms have American CEOs and both have operations in the US and Germany.
ADTRAN acquired Nokia Siemens Networks’ fixed-line broadband access unit in 2011 while ADVA more recently acquired US firms, MRV Communications and Overture.
Brian Protiva, CEO of ADVA and a co-founder of the company in 1994, is the longest-serving CEO in the optical industry. As such he will have thought long and hard about the deal.
“This business combination is not only about growing the business,” says Protiva. “These two businesses fit perfectly together to address existing market and technology requirements, and we are well-positioned to lead the transition to access and edge convergence.”
Service providers do not need separate infrastructure for business services, residential broadband, and/ or 5G xHauling, he says.
Mechanics
The proposed deal is an all-stock one with ADTRAN and ADVA combining to form ADTRAN Holdings.
Each ADVA share will be swapped for 0.8244 shares of the new company while ADTRAN shares will be exchanged on a one-for-one basis. ADTRAN shareholders will own 54 per cent of the combined company while ADVA shareholders will own 46 per cent, assuming all of the ADVA shares are swapped.
But the new holding company must first be approved by German regulators, expected to occur by November. A three-month offer period then starts during which a minimum of 70 per cent of ADVA shares must be surrendered.
Stanton will continue as CEO and chairman at the new company while ADVA’s Protiva will join as executive vice chairman.
“I’m convinced that Tom is the right person to run the combined company,” says Protiva. “He executes to plan, is well-liked by customers, and thinks very similarly to our ADVA leadership around people first and the customer experience.” Stanton is also a long-serving CEO, heading ADTRAN since 2005.
Protiva will support Stanton during the integration period and then be involved in the corporate strategic direction of ADTRAN, as a board member, using his many long-term relationships in the combined markets.
After that, Protiva says he may return to Egora, a holding company out of which ADVA was born.
ADVA’s CTO, Christoph Glingener, will retain his role with the new company. ADTRAN and ADVA will have a combined annual R&D budget of $250 million.
”The stock exchange offer needs to pass all types of regulatory groups and needs to be accepted by the ADTRAN and ADVA shareholders,” stresses Rettenberger. “There is still a long path to closing.”
ADVA’s 800-gigabit CoreChannel causes a stir
ADVA’s latest addition to its FSP 3000 TeraFlex platform provides 800-gigabit optical transmission. But the announcement has caused a kerfuffle among its optical transport rivals.
ADVA’s TeraFlex platform supports various coherent optical transport sleds, a sled being a pluggable modular unit that customises a platform’s functionality.
The coherent sleds use Cisco’s (formerly Acacia Communication’s) AC1200 optical engine. Cisco completed the acquisition of Acacia in March.
The AC1200 comprises a 16nm CMOS Pico coherent digital signal processor (DSP) that supports two wavelengths, each up to 600-gigabit, and two photonic integrated circuits (PICs), for a maximum capacity of 1.2 terabits.
The latest sled from ADVA, dubbed CoreChannel, supports an 800-gigabit stream in a single channel.
ADVA states in its press release that the CoreChannel uses “140 gigabaud (GBd) sub-carrier technology” to deliver 800-gigabit over distances exceeding 1,600km.
This, the company says, improves reach by over 50 per cent compared with state-of-the-art 95GBd symbol rate coherent technologies.
It is these claims that have its rivals reacting.
“Despite their claims – they are not using actual digital sub-carriers,” says one executive from a rival optical transport firm, adding that what ADVA is doing is banding two independent 70GBd 400-gigabit wavelengths together and trying to treat that as a single 800-gigabit signal.
“This isn’t necessarily a bad solution for some applications – each network operator can decide that for themselves,” says the executive. However, he stresses that the CoreChannel is not an 800-gigabit single-channel solution and uses 4th generation 16nm CMOS DSP technology rather than the latest 5th generation, 7nm CMOS DSP technology.
A second executive, from another optical transport vendor providing 800-gigabit single-wavelength solutions, adds that ADVA’s claim of 140GBd is too ‘creative’ for a two-lambda solution.
“It’s not a real 800 gigabit. Not that this must be bad, but one should call things as they are,” the spokesperson said. “What matters to the operators is the cost, power consumption, reach and density of a modem; the number of lambdas is more of an internal feature.”
CoreChannel
ADVA confirms it is indeed using Cisco’s Pico coherent DSP to drive two wavelengths, each at 400 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).
“You can say the CoreChannel is a less challenging requirement because we are not driving it [the Pico DSP] to the maximum modulation or constellation complexity,” says Stephan Rettenberger, senior vice president, marketing and investor relations at ADVA. “It is the lower end of what the AC1200 can do.”
Until now the two wavelengths have been combined externally, and have not been integrated from a software or a command-and-control approach.
“The CoreChannel sled is just another addition to the TeraFlex toolbox,” says Rettenberger. “It has one physical line interface that drives an 800Gbps stream using two wavelengths, each one around 70GBd, that are logically and physically combined.”
The resulting two-wavelength 800-gigabit stream sits within a 150GHz channel. However, the channel width can be reduced to 125GHz and even 112.5GHz for greater spectral efficiency.
ADVA says the motivation for the design is the customers’ requirement for lower-cost transport and the ability to easily transport 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) client signals.
“With this 800-gigabit line speed, you can go something like 2,000km, that is 50-100 per cent more than what 95GBd single-wavelengths solutions will do,“ says Rettenberger. “And you can also drive it at 400 gigabits and you can do something like 6,000km.”
The reaches quoted are based on a recent field trial involving ADVA.
ADVA uses a single DSP, similar to the latest 800-gigabit systems from Ciena, Huawei and Infinera. Alongside the DSP are two non-hermetically-sealed PICs whereas the 95GBd indium-phosphide solutions use a single hermetically sealed gold box.
ADVA’s solution also requires two lasers whereas the 800-gigabit single-wavelength solutions use one laser.
“Yes, we have two lasers versus one but that is not killing the cost,” says Rettenberger. “And it is also not killing the power consumption because the PIC is so much more power efficient.”
Rettenberger stresses that ADVA is not saying its offering is necessarily a better solution. “But it is a very interesting way to drive 800 gigabits further than these 95 gigabaud solutions,” says Rettenberger. “It has the same cost, space, power efficiency, just greater reach.”
ADVA also agrees that it is not using electrical sub-carriers such as Infinera uses but it is using optical sub-carrier technology.
These two wavelengths are combined logically and also from a physical port interface point of view to fit within a 150GHz window.
The 95GBd, in contrast, is an interim symbol rate step and the resulting 112.5GHz channel width doesn’t easily fit with legacy 25GHz and 50GHz band increments, says ADVA, while the 150GHz band the CoreChannel sled uses is the same channel width that will be used once single-wavelength 140GBd technology becomes available.
Acacia has also long talked about the merit of doubling the baud rate suggesting Cisco’s successor to the AC1200 will have a 140GBd symbol rate. Such a design is expected in the next year or two.
“We feel this [CoreChannel] implementation is already future-proofed,” says Rettenberger.
ADVA says it undertook this development in collaboration with Acacia.
Acacia announced a dual-wavelength single-channel AC1200 solution in 2019. Then, the company unveiled its AC1200-SC2 that delivers 1.2 terabits over an optical channel.
The SC2 (single chip, single channel) is an upgrade of Acacia’s AC1200 module in that it sends 1.2 terabits using two sub-carriers that fit in a 150GHz-wide channel.
Customer considerations
Choosing an optical solution comes down to five factors, each having its weight depending on the network application, says the first executive.
These are capacity-per-wavelength, cost-per-bit, capacity-per- optical-engine or -module, spectral efficiency and hence capacity-per-fibre, and power-per-bit.
“Each is measured for a given distance/ network application,” says the executive. “And the reason the weight changes for different applications is that the importance of each factor is different at different points in the network. For example, the importance of spectral efficiency changes depending on how expensive it is to light up a link (fibre and line system costs).”
For long-haul and submarine, spectral efficiency is the most important factor, while for metro it is typically cost-per-bit. Meanwhile, for data centre interconnect applications, it’s a mix between cost-per-bit and power-per-bit. Capacity-per-wave and capacity-per-optical-engine are valuable because they can reduce the number of wavelengths and modules that need to be deployed, reducing operating expenses and accelerating service activation.
“The reason that 5th generation [7nm CMOS technology] is superior to fourth generation [16nm] DSP technology is that it provides superior performance in every single one of those key criteria,” says the executive. “This fact minimised any potential benefits that could be achieved by banding together two wavelengths using 4th generation technology when compared to a single wavelength using 5th generation technology.”
“It sounds like others feel we have misled the market; that was not the intent,” says Rettenberger.
ADVA does not make its own coherent DSP so it doesn’t care if the chip is implemented using a 16nm, 7nm or a 5nm CMOS process.
“We are trying to build a good solution for transmitting 400GbE signals and, for us, the Pico chip is a wonderful piece of technology that we have now implemented in four different [sled] variants of TeraFlex.”
ECOC 2019 industry reflections
Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent ECOC show, held in Dublin. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from Huawei, OFS Fitel and ADVA.
James Wangyin, senior product expert, access and transmission product line at Huawei
At ECOC, one technology that is becoming a hot topic is machine learning. There is much work going on to model devices and perform optimisation at the system level.
And while there was much discussion about 400-gigabit and 800-gigabit coherent optical transmissions, 200-gigabit will continue to be the mainstream speed for the coming three-to-five years.
That is because, despite the high-speed ports, most networks are not being run at the highest speed. More time is also needed for 400-gigabit interfaces to mature before massive deployment starts.
BT and China Telecom both showed excellent results running 200-gigabit transmissions in their networks for distances over 1,000km.
We are seeing this with our shipments; we are experiencing a threefold year-on-year growth in 200-gigabit ports.
Another topic confirmed at ECOC is that fibre is a must for 5G. People previously expressed concern that 5G would shrink the investment of fibre but many carriers and vendors now agree that 5G will boost the need for fibre networks.
As for surprises at the show, the main discussion seems to have shifted from high-speed optics to system-level or device-level optimisation using machine learning.
Many people are also exploring new applications based on the fibre network.
For example, at a workshop to discuss new applications beyond 5G, a speaker from Orange talked about extending fibre connections to each room, and even to desktops and other devices. Other operators and systems vendors expressed similar ideas.
Verizon discussed, in another market focus talk, its monitoring of traffic and the speed of cars using fibre deployed alongside roads. This is quite impressive.
We are also seeing the trend of using fibre and 5G to create a fully-connected world.
Such applications will likely bring new opportunities to the optical industry.
Two other items to note.
The Next Generation Optical Transport Network Forum (NGOF) presented updates on optical technologies in China. Such technologies include next-generation OTN standardisation, the transition to 200 gigabits, mobile transport and the deployment of ROADMs. The NGOF also seeks more interaction with the global community.
The 800G Pluggable MSA was also present at ECOC. The MSA is also keen for more companies to join.
Daryl Inniss, director, new business development at OFS Fitel
There were many discussions about co-packaged optics, regarding the growth trends in computing and the technology’s use in the communications market.
This is a story about high-bandwidth interfaces and not just about linking equipment but also the technology’s use for on-board optical interconnects and chip-to-chip communications such as linking graphics processing units (GPUs).
I learned that HPE has developed a memory-centric computing system that improves significantly processing speed and workload capacity. This may not be news but it was new to me. Moreover, HPE is using silicon photonics in its system including a quantum dot comb laser, a technology that will come for others.
As for surprises, there was a notable growing interest in spatial-division multiplexing (SDM). The timescale may be long term but the conversations and debate were lively. Two areas to watch are in proprietary applications such as very short interconnects in a supercomputer and for undersea networks where the hyperscalers quickly consume the capacity on any newly commission link.
Lastly, another topic of note was the use of spectrum outside the C-band and extending the C-band itself to increase the data-carrying capacity of the fibre.
Jörg-Peter Elbers, senior vice president, advanced technology, ADVA
Co-packaging optics with electronics is gaining momentum as the industry moves to higher and higher silicon throughput. The advent of 51.2 terabit-per-second (Tbps) top-of-rack switches looks like a good interception point. Microsoft and Facebook also have a co-packaged optics collaboration initiative.
As for coherent, quo vadis? Well, one direction is higher speeds and feeds. What will the next symbol rate be for coherent after 60-70 gigabaud (GBd)? A half-step or a full-step; incremental or leap-frogging? The growing consensus is a full-step: 120-140 GBd.
Another direction for coherent is new applications such as access/ aggregation networks. Yet cost, power and footprint challenges will have to be solved.
Advanced optical packaging, an example being the OIF IC-TROSA project, as well as compact silicon photonics and next-gen coherent DSPs are all critical elements here.
A further issue arising from ECOC is whether optical networks need to deliver more than just bandwidth.
Latency is becoming increasingly important to address time-sensitive applications as well as for advanced radio technologies such as 5G and beyond.
Additional applications are the delivery of precise timing information (frequency, time of day, phase synchronisation) where the existing fibre infrastructure can be used to deliver additional services.
An interesting new field is the use of the communication infrastructure for sensing, with Glenn Wellbrock giving a presentation on Verizon’s work at the Market Focus.
Other topics of note include innovation in fibres and optics for 5G.
With spatial-division multiplexing, interest in multi-core and multi-mode fibre applications have weakened. Instead, more parallel fibres operating in the linear regime appear as an energy-efficient, space-division multiplexing alternative.
Hollow-core fibres are also making progress, offering not only lower latencies but lower nonlinearity compared to standard fibres.
As for optics for 5G, what is clear is that 5G requires more bandwidth and more intelligence at the edge. How network solutions will look will depend on fibre availability and the associated cost.
With eCPRI, Ethernet is becoming the convergence protocol for 5G transport. While grey and WDM (G.metro) optics, as well as next-generation PON, are all being discussed as optical underlay options. Grey and WDM optics offer an unbundling on the fibre/virtual fibre level whereas (TDM-)PON requires bitstream access.
Another observation is that radio “x-haul” [‘x’ being front, mid or back] will continue to play an important role for locations where fibre is nonexistent and uneconomical.
Acacia eyes pluggables as it demos its AC1200 module
The emerging market opportunity for pluggable coherent modules is causing companies to change their strategies.
Ciena is developing and plans to sell its own coherent modules. And now Acacia Communications, the coherent technology specialist, says it is considering changing its near-term coherent digital signal processor (DSP) roadmap to focus on coherent pluggables for data centre interconnect and metro applications.
Source: Gazettabyte
DSP roadmap
Acacia’s coherent DSP roadmap in recent years has alternated between an ASIC for low-power, shorter-reach applications followed by a DSP to address more demanding, long-haul applications.
In 2014, Acacia announced its Sky 100-gigabit DSP for metro applications that was followed in 2015 by its Denali dual-core DSP that powers its 400-gigabit AC-400 5x7-inch module. Then, in 2016, Acacia unveiled its low-power Meru, used within its pluggable CFP2-DCO modules. The high-end 1.2-terabit dual-core Pico DSP used for Acacia’s board-mounted AC1200 coherent module was unveiled in 2017.
“The 400ZR is our next focus,” says Tom Williams, senior director of marketing at Acacia.
The 400ZR standard, promoted by the large internet content providers, is being developed to link switches in separate data centres up to 80km apart. Acacia’s subsequent coherent DSP that follows the 400ZR may also target pluggable applications such as 400-gigabit CFP2-DCO modules that will span metro and metro-regional distances.
“There is a trend to pluggable, not just the 400ZR but the CFP2-DCO [400-gigabit] for metro,” says Williams. “We are still evaluating whether that causes a shift in our overall cadence and DSP development.”
AC1200 trials
Meanwhile, Acacia has announced the results of two transatlantic trials involving its AC1200 module whose production is now ramping.
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“There is a trend to pluggable, not just the 400ZR but the CFP2-DCO [400-gigabit] for metro”
In the first trial, Acacia, working with ADVA, transmitted a 300-gigabit signal over a 6,800km submarine cable. The 300-gigabit wavelength occupied a 70GHz channel and used ADVA’s Teraflex technology, part of ADVA’s FSP 3000 CloudConnect platform. Teraflex is a one-rack-unit (1RU) stackable chassis that supports three hot-pluggable 1.2-terabit sleds, each sled incorporating an Acacia AC1200 module.
In a separate trial, the AC1200 was used to send a 400-gigabit signal over 6,600km using the Marea submarine cable. Marea is a joint project between Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius that links the US and Spain. The cable is designed for performance and uses an open line system, says Williams: “It is not tailored to a particular company’s [transport] solution”.
The AC1200 module - 40 percent smaller than the 5x7-inch AC400 module - uses Acacia’s patented Fractional QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) technology. The technology uses probabilistic constellation shaping that allows for non-integer constellations. “Instead of 3 or 4 bits-per-symbol, you can have 3.56 bits-per-symbol,” says Williams.
Acacia’s Fractional QAM also uses an adaptive baud rate. For the trial, the 400-gigabit wavelength was sent using the maximum baud rate of just under 70 gigabaud. Using the baud rate to the full allows a lower constellation to be used for the 400-gigabit wavelength thereby achieving the best optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and hence reach.
In a second demonstration using the Marea cable, Acacia demonstrated a smaller-width channel in order to maximise the overall capacity sent down the fibre. Here, a lower baud rate/ higher constellation combination was used to achieve a spectral efficiency of 6.41 bits-per-second-per-Hertz (b/s/Hz). “If you built out all the channels [on the fibre], you achieve of the order of 27 terabits,” says Williams.
Pluggable coherent
The 400ZR will be implemented using the same OSFP and QSFP-DD pluggable modules used for 400-gigabit client-side interfaces. This is why an advanced 7nm CMOS process is needed to implement the 400ZR DSP so that its power consumption will be sufficiently low to meet the modules’ power envelopes when integrated with Acacia’s silicon-photonics optics.
There is also industry talk of a ZR+, a pluggable module with a reach exceeding80km. “At ECOC, there was more talk about the ZR+,” says Williams. “We will see if it becomes standardised or just additional proprietary performance.”
Another development is the 400-gigabit CFP2-DCO. At present, the CFP2-DCO delivers up to 200-gigabitwavelengths but the standard, as defined by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF), also supports 400 gigabits.
Williams says that there a greater urgency to develop the 400ZR than the 400-gigabit CFP2-DCO. “People would like to ramp the ZR pretty close to the timing of the 400-gigabit client-side interfaces,” says Williams. And that is likely to be from mid-2019.
In contrast, the 400-gigabit CFP2-DCO pluggable while wanted by carriers for metro applications, is not locked to any other infrastructure build-out, says Williams.
TIP launches a disaggregated cell-site gateway design
Four leading telecom operators, members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), have developed a disaggregated white-box design for cell sites. The four operators are Orange, Telefonica, TIM Brazil and Vodafone. BT is also believed to be backing the open-design cell-site venture.
Source: ADVA
The first TIP cell-site gateway product, known as Odyssey-DCSG, is being brought to market by ADVA and Edgecore Networks.
TIP isn’t the only open design framework that is developing cell-site gateways. Edgecore Networks contributed in October a design to the Open Compute Project (OCP) that is based on an AT&T cell-site gateway specification. There are thus two overlapping open networking initiatives developing disaggregated cell-site gateways.
ADVA and Edgecore will provide the standardised cell-site gateways as operators deploy 5G. The platforms will support either commercial cell-site gateway software or open-source code.
“We are providing a white box at cell sites to interconnect them back into the network,” says Bill Burger, vice president, business development and marketing, North America at Edgecore Networks.
“The cell site is a really nice space for a white-box because volumes are high,” says Niall Robinson, vice president, global business development at ADVA. Vodafone alone has stated that it has 300,000 cell-site gateways that will need to be updated for 5G.
Odyssey-DCSG
A mobile cell site comprises remote radio units (RRUs) located on cell towers that interface to the mobile baseband unit (BBU). The baseband unit also connects to the disaggregated cell-site gateway with the two platforms communicating using IP-over-Ethernet. “The cell-site gateway is basically an IP box,” says Robinson.
The Odyssey gateway design is based on a general-purpose Intel microprocessor and a 120-gigabit Broadcom Qumran-UX switch chip.
The white box’s link speeds to the baseband unit range from legacy 10 megabit-per-second (Mbps) to 1 gigabit-per-second (Gbps). The TIP gateway’s uplinks are two 25-gigabit SFP28 modules typically. In contrast, the OCP’s gateway design uses a higher capacity 300-gigabit Qumran-AX switch chip and has two 100-gigabit QSFP28 uplink interfaces. “There is a difference in capacity [for the two designs] and hence in their cost,” says Robinson.
The cell-site gateway is basically an IP box
The cell-site gateways can be connected in a ring with the traffic fed to an aggregation unit for transmission within the network.
Robinson expects other players to join ADVA and Edgecore as project partners to bring the TIP gateway to market. To date, no software partners have been announced. First samples of the platform are expected in the first quarter of 2019 with general availability in the third quarter of 2019.
“Cell-site gateways is one of those markets that will benefit from driving a common design,” says Robinson. The goal is to get away from operators choosing proprietary platforms. “You have one design hitting the market and being chosen by the different end users,” he says. “Volumes go up and costs go down.”
ADVA is also acting as the systems integrator, offering installation, commissioning and monitoring services for the gateway. “People like disaggregation when costs are being added up but end users like things - especially in high volumes - to be reintegrated to make it easy for their operations folk,” says Robinson.
The disaggregated cell-site gateway project is part of TIP’s Open Optical and Packet Transport group, the same group that is developing the Voyager packet-optical white box.
Source: Gazettabyte
Voyager
ADVA announced recently that the Voyager platform is now available, two years after being unveiled.
The 1-rack-unit Voyager platform uses up to 2 terabits of the 3.2-terabit Broadcom Tomahawk switch-chip: a dozen 100-gigabit client-side interfaces and 800 gigabits of coherent line-side capacity.
Robinson admits that the Voyager platform would have come to market earlier had SnapRoute - providing the platform’s operating system - not withdrawn from the project. Cumulus Networks then joined the project as SnapRoute’s replacement.
“This shows both sides of the white-box model,” says Robinson. How a collective project design can have a key member drop out but also the strength of a design community when a replacement can step in.
TIP has yet to announce Voyager customers although the expectation is that this will happen in the next six months.
Robinson identifies two use cases for the platform: regional metro networks of up to 600km and data centre interconnect.
“Voyager has four networking ports allowing an optical network to be built,” says Robinson. “Once you have that in place, it is very easy to set up Layer-2 and Layer-3 services on top.”
The second use case is data centre interconnect, providing enterprises with Layer-2 trucking connectivity services between sites. “Voyager is not just about getting bits across but about Layer-2 structures,” says Robinson.
The Voyager is not targeted at leading internet content providers that operate large-scale data centres. They will use specific, leading-edge platforms. “The hyperscalers have moved on,” says Robinson. “The Voyager will play in a different market, a smaller-sized data centre interconnect space.”
We will be right at the front and I think we will reap the rewards for jumping in early
Early-mover advantage
Robinson contrasts how the Voyager and TIP’s cell-site gateway were developed. Facebook developed and contributed the Voyager design to TIP and only then did members become aware of the design.
With the cell-site gateway, a preliminary specification was developed with one customer - Vodafone - before it was taken to other operators. These companies that make up a good portion of the cell site market worked on the specification before being offered to the TIP marketplace for development.
“This is the right model for a next-generation Voyager design,” says Robinson. Moreover, rather than addressing the hyperscalers’ specialised requirements involving the latest coherent chips and optical pluggable modules, the next Voyager design should be more like the cell-site gateway, says Robinson: “A little bit more bread-and-butter: go after the 100-gigabit market and make that more of a commodity.”
ADVA also believes in a first-mover advantage with open networking designs such as the TIP cell-site gateway.
“We have been involved for quite some time, as has Edgecore with which we have teamed up,” says Robinson. “We will be right at the front and I think we will reap the rewards for jumping in early.”
Part 2: Open networking, click here