OFC 2025 industry reflections - Part 2
Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the 50th-anniversary OFC show in San Francisco. In Part 2, the contributions are from BT’s Professor Andrew Lord, Chris Cole, Coherent’s Vipul Bhatt, and Juniper Network’s Dirk van den Borne.ontent
Professor Andrew Lord, Head of Optical Network Research at BT Group
OFC was a highly successful and lively show this year, reflecting a sense of optimism in the optical comms industry. The conference was dominated by the need for optics in data centres to handle the large AI-driven demands. And it was exciting to see the conference at an all-time attendance peak.
From a carrier perspective, I continued to appreciate the maturing of 800-gigabit plugs for core networks and 100GZR plugs (including bidirectional operation for single-fibre working) for the metro-access side.
Hollow-core fibre continues to progress with multiple companies developing products, and evidence for longer lengths of fibre in manufacturing. Though dominated by data centres and low-latency applications such as financial trading, use cases are expected to spread into diverse areas such as subsea cables and 6G xHaul.
There was also a much-increased interest in fibre sensing as an additional revenue generator for telecom operators, although compelling use cases will require more cost-effective technology.
Lastly, there has been another significant increase in quantum technology at OFC. There was an ever-increasing number of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols on display but with a current focus on Continuous—Variable QKD (CV-QKD), which might be more readily manufacturable and easier to integrate.
Chris Cole, Optical Communications Advisor
For the premier optics conference, the amount of time and floor space devoted to electrical interfaces was astounding.
Even more amazing is that while copper’s death at the merciless hands of optics continues to be reported, the percentage of time devoted to electrical work at OFC is going up. Multiple speakers commented on this throughout the week.
One reason is that as rates increase, the electrical links connecting optical links to ASICs are becoming disproportionately challenging. The traditional Ethernet model of electrical adding a small penalty to the overall link is becoming less valid.
Another reason is the introduction of power-saving interfaces, such as linear and half-retimed, which tightly couple the optical and electrical budgets.
Optics engineers now have to worry about S-parameters and cross-talk of electrical connectors, vias, package balls, copper traces and others.
The biggest buzz in datacom was around co-packaged optics, helped by Nvidia’s switch announcements at GTC in March.
Established companies and start-ups were outbidding each other with claims of the highest bandwidth in the smallest space; typically the more eye-popping the claims, the less actual hard engineering data to back them up. This is for a market that is still approximately zero and faces its toughest hurdles of yield and manufacturability ahead.
To their credit, some companies are playing the long game and doing the slow, hard work to advance the field. For example, I continue to cite Broadcom for publishing extensive characterisation of their co-packaged optics and establishing the bar for what is minimally acceptable for others if they want to claim to be real.
The irony is that, in the meantime, pluggable modules are booming, and it was exciting to see so many suppliers thriving in this space, as demonstrated by the products and traffic in their booths.
The best news for pluggable module suppliers is that if co-packaged optics takes off, it will create more bandwidth demand in the data centre, driving up the need for pluggables.
I may have missed it, but no coherent ZR or other long-range co-packaged optics were announced.
A continued amazement at each OFC is the undying interest and effort in various incarnations of general optical computing.
Despite having no merit as easily shown on first principles, the number of companies and researchers in the field is growing. This is also despite the market holding steady at zero.
The superficiality of the field is best illustrated by a slogan gaining popularity and heard at OFC: computing at the speed of light. This is despite the speed of propagation being similar in copper and optical waveguides. The reported optical computing devices are hundreds of thousands or millions of times larger than equivalent CMOS circuits, resulting in the distance, not the speed, determining the compute time.
Practical optical computing precision is limited to about four bits, unverfied claims of higher precision not withstanding, making it useless in datacenter applications.
Vipul Bhatt, Vice President, Corporate Strategic Marketing at Coherent.
Three things stood out at OFC:
- The emergence of transceivers based on 200-gigabit VCSELs
- A rising entrepreneurial interest in optical circuit switching
- And an accelerated momentum towards 1.6-terabit (8×200-gigabit transceivers) alongside the push for 400-gigabit lanes due to AI-driven bandwidth expansion.
The conversations about co-packaged optics showed increasing maturity, shifting from ‘pluggable versus co-packaged optics’ to their co-existence. The consensus is now more nuanced: co-packaged optics may find its place, especially if it is socketed, while front-panel pluggables will continue to thrive.
Strikingly, talk of optical interconnects beyond 400-gigabit lanes was almost nonexistent. Even as we develop 400 gigabit-per-lane products, we should be planning the next step: either another speed leap (this industry has never disappointed) or, more likely, a shift to ‘fast-and-wide’, blurring the boundary between scale-out and scale-up by using a high radix.
Considering the fast cadence of bandwidth upgrades, the absence of such a pivotal discussion was unexpected.
Dirk van den Borne, director of system engineering at Juniper Networks
The technology singularity is defined as the merger of man and machine. However, after a week at OFC, I will venture a different definition where we call the “AI singularity” the point when we only talk about AI every waking hour and nothing else. The industry seemed close to this point at OFC 2025.
My primary interest at the show was the industry’s progress around 1.6-terabit optics, from scale-up inside the rack to data centre interconnect and long-haul using ZR/ZR+ optics. The industry here is changing and innovating at an incredible pace, driven by the vast opportunity that AI unlocks for companies across the optics ecosystem.
A highlight was the first demos of 1.6-terabit optics using a 3nm CMOS process DSP, which have started to tape out and bring the power consumption down from a scary 30W to a high but workable 25W. Well beyond the power-saving alone, this difference matters a lot in the design of high-density switches and routers.
It’s equally encouraging to see the first module demos with 200 gigabit-per-lane VCSELs and half-retimed linear-retimed optical (LRO) pluggables. Both approaches can potentially reduce the optics power consumption to 20W and below.
The 1.6-terabit ecosystem is rapidly taking shape and will be ready for prime time once 1.6-terabit switch ASICs arrive in the marketplace. There’s still a lot of buzz around linear pluggable optics (LPO) and co-packaged optics, but both don’t seem ready yet. LPO mostly appears to be a case of too little, too late. It wasn’t mature enough to be useful at 800 gigabits, and the technology will be highly challenging for 1.6 terabits.
The dream of co-packaged optics will likely have to wait for two more years, though it does seem inevitable. But with 1.6 terabit pluggable optics maturing quickly, I don’t see it having much impact in this generation.
The ZR/ZR+ coherent optics are also progressing rapidly. Here, 800-gigabit is ready, with proven interoperability between modules and DSPs using the OpenROADM probabilistic constellation shaping standard, a critical piece for interoperability in more demanding applications.
The road to 1600ZR coherent optics for data centre interconnect (DCI) is now better understood, and power consumption projections seem reasonable for 2nm DSP designs.
Unfortunately, the 1600ZR+ is more of a question mark to me, as ongoing standardisation is taking this in a different direction and, hence, a different DSP design from 1600ZR. The most exciting discussions are around “scale-up” and how optics can replace copper for intra-rack connectivity.
This is an area of great debate and speculation, with wildly differing technologies being proposed. However, the goal of around 10 petabit-per-second (Pbps) in cross-sectional bandwidth in a single rack is a terrific industry challenge, one that can spur the development of technologies that might open up new markets for optics well beyond the initial AI cluster application.
The APC’s blueprint for silicon photonics
The Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) wants to smooth the path for silicon photonics to become a high-volume manufacturing technology.
The organisation is talking to companies to tackle issues whose solutions will benefit the photonics technology.
The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to act as an industry catalyst to prove technologies and reduce the risk associated with their development, says Jeffery Maki, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a member of the Advanced Photonics Coalition’s board.
Origins
The Advanced Photonics Coalition was unveiled at the Photonic-Enabled Cloud Computing (PECC) Industry Summit jointly held with Optica last October.
The Coalition was formerly known as the Coalition for On-Board Optics (COBO), an industry initiative led by Microsoft.
Microsoft wanted a standard for on-board optics, until then it was a proprietary technology. At the time, on-board optics was seen as an important stepping stone between pluggable optical modules and their ultimate successor, co-packaged optics.
After years of work developing specifications and products, Microsoft chose not to adopt on-board optics in its data centres. Although COBO added other work activities, such as co-packaged optics, the organisation lost momentum and members.
Maki stresses that COBO always intended to tackle other work besides its on-board optics starting point.
Now, this is the Advanced Photonics Coalition’s goal: to have a broad remit to create working groups to address a range of issues.
Tackling technologies
Many standards organisations publish specifications but leave the implementation technologies to their member companies. In contrast, the Advanced Photonics Coalition is taking a technology focus. It wants to remove hurdles associated with silicon photonics to ease its adoption.
“Today, we see the artificial intelligence and machine learning opportunities growing, both in software and hardware,” says Maki. “We see a need in the coming years for more hardware and innovative solutions, especially in power, latency, and interconnects.”
Work Groups
In the past, systems vendors like Cisco or Juniper drove industry initiatives, and other companies fell in line. More recently, it was the hyperscalers that took on the role.
There is less of that now, says Maki: “We have a lot of companies with technologies and good ideas, but there is not a strong leadership.”
The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to fill that void and address companies’ common concerns in critical areas. “Key customers will then see the value of, and be able to access, that standard or technology that’s then fostered,” says Maki.
The Advanced Photonics Coalition has yet to announce new working groups but it expects to do so in 2024.
One area of interest is silicon photonics foundries and their process design kits (PDKs). Each foundry has a PDK, made up of tools, models, and documentation, to help engineers with the design and manufacture of photonic integrated devices.
“A starting point might be support for more than one foundry in a multi-foundry PDK,” says Maki. “Perhaps a menu item to select the desired foundry where more than one foundry has been verified to support.”
Silicon photonics has long been promoted as a high-volume manufacturing technology for the optical industry. “But it is not if it has been siloed into separate efforts such that there is not that common volume,” says Maki.
Such a PDK effort would identify gaps that each foundry would need to fill. “The point is to provide for more than one foundry to be able to produce the item,” he says.
A company is also talking to the Advanced Photonics Coalition about co-packaged optics. The company has developed an advanced co-packaged optics solution, but it is proprietary.
“Even with a proprietary offering, one can make changes to improve market acceptance,” says Maki. The aim is to identify the areas of greatest contention and remedy them first, for example, the external laser source. “Opening that up to other suppliers through standards adoption, existing or new, is one possibility,” he says.
The Advanced Photonics Coalition is also exploring optical interconnecting definitions with companies. “How we do fibre-attached to silicon photonics, there’s a desire that there is standardisation to open up the market more,” says Maki. “That’s more surgical but still valuable.”
And there are discussions about a working group to address co-packaged optics for the radio access network (RAN). Ericsson is one company interested in co-packaged optics for the RAN. Another working group being discussed could tackle optical backplanes.
Maki says there are opportunities here to benefit the industry.
“Companies should understand that nothing is slowing them down or blocking them from doing something other than their ingenuity or their own time,” he says.
Status
COBO had 50 members earlier in 2023. Now, the membership listed on the website has dropped to 39 and the number could further dip; companies that joined for COBO may still decide to leave.
At the time of writing, an new as yet unannounced member has joined the Advanced Photonics Coalition, taking the membership to 40.
“Some of those companies that left, we think they will return once we get the working groups formed,” says Maki, who remains confident that the organisation will play an important industry role.
“Every time I have a conversation with a company about the status of the market and the needs that they see for the coming years, there’s good alignment amongst multiple companies,” he says.
There is an opportunity for an organisation to focus on the implementation aspects and the various technology platforms and bring more harmony to them, something other standards organisations don’t do, says Maki.
Neil McRae: What’s next for the telecom industry
In a talk at the FutureNet World conference, held in London on May 3-4, Neil McRae explains why he is upbeat about the telecoms industry’s prospects
Neil McRae is tasked with giving the final talk of the two-day FutureNet World conference.
“Yeah, I’m on the graveyard shift,” he quips.
McRae, the former chief network architect at BT, is now chief network strategist at Juniper Network.
The talk’s title is “What’s Next”, McRae’s take on the telecom industry and how it can grow.
McRae starts with how, as a 15-year-old, he had attended an Apple Macintosh computer event at a Novotel Hotel in Hammersmith, London, possibly even this one hosting this conference.
An Apple representative had asked for his feedback as a Macintosh programmer. McRae then listed all the shortfalls programming the PC. Later, he learnt that he had been talking to Steve Jobs.
Perhaps this explains his continual focus on customers and meeting their needs.
What customers care about, says McRae, is ‘new stuff’ that makes a difference in their lives. “Quite often in telecoms, we accidentally change the world without even thinking about it,” he says
McRae cites as an example using FaceTime to watch a newborn grandchild halfway across the world.
“We do it all the time; it is a phenomenal thing about our industry,” says McRae.
The Unvarnished Truth
McRae moves to showing several market and telco survey charts from IDC and Analysys Mason, what he calls ‘The unvarnished truth’.
The first slide shows how the European enterprise communication service market is set to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3% between 2020 and 2025.
“Three per cent growth, who thinks that is a great business for telcos?” says McRae. “And enterprise is what we are all depending on for big growth and change because [the] consumer [market] is pretty much flat,” says McRae.
Another chart shows similar minimal growth: a forecast that Western Europe’s mobile retail service market will grow from $102 billion in 2016 to $109 billion by 2026. Yet mobile is where the telcos spend a ton of money, he says.
“So, who thinks we should continue doing what we are doing?” McRae asks the audience.
Another forecast showing global fixed and mobile service revenues is marginally better since it includes developing nations that still lack telecommunications services.
In the UK, 95 per cent of the population is on the internet, in Europe it is 84%, says McRae: “The UK is a tough place to be to grow business.”
Telco transformation
Another slide (see above), the results of a telco survey, shows a list of topics and their impact on telco transformation. McRae asks the audience to respond to those they think will ‘save’ the industry.
He goes through the list: cloud and cloudification, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, 5G, and data analytics. The audience remains muted.
The next item is application programming interfaces (APIs). Again the audience is quiet. “You have been talking about APIs for two days!” says McRae.
“The right APIs,” shouts an audience member. “Ah, yes, the right APIs,” says McRae.
McRae continues down the list, virtualisation and software-defined infrastructure, OpenRAN elements – “not sure what the elements mean” – orchestration platforms, advanced process automation (OSS/BSS), micro-services, and blockchain.
McRae says he has spent the equivalent of a small nation’s budget over his career on OSS and BSS. “Nothing is automated, and I can’t get the data I need,” he says.
McRae gives his view. He believes the cloud will help telcos, but what most excites him is AI and machine learning, and data analytics.
“Learning the insights the data tells us and using them, putting a pound sign on them,” says McRae. “We have done some of that, but there is much more to do.”
He puts up a second survey showing the priorities of European operators: customer experience and increasing operational agility.
“Finally, after years, telcos realise that customers are important,” he says.
Opportunities
The survey also highlights the telcos’ belief that they can deliver solutions for industries and enterprise customers.
“This is a massive opportunity for telcos that allows us to grow revenues, create cool technology and hire amazing engineers,” says McRae.
The transformation needed in telecoms is about customers and taking risks with customers, he says.
One opportunity is digitalisation. McRae points outs that digitalisation is a process that never stops.
The three leading Chinese operators are keenly pursuing what they call industrial digitalisation or industrial internet. For China Telecom, industrial digitalisation now accounts for a quarter of its service revenues.
“Today, it is about cloud, cloud technologies, and smartphones, but tomorrow it could be about wearables or technology that is tracking what you are doing and making your life easier,” says McRae.
Digitalisation is an expertise that the telecom industry is not putting enough effort into, he says: “And as telcos, we have a massive right to play here.”
Another opportunity is AI and data, learning from the insights present in data to grow revenue.
“We have more data than most organisations, we haven’t used it very well, and we can build upon it,” says McRae, adding that AI needs the network to be valuable and improve our lives.
With data and AI, trust is vital. “If we are not trusted as an industry, we are dead,” says McRae. But because telcos are trusted entities, they can help other organisations improve trustworthiness.
Another opportunity is using the network for humans to interact in advanced ways. Since telecoms is a resource-heavy industry, such network-aided interaction would be immediately beneficial.
For this, what is needed is a cloud-native platform that integrates well with the network, and cloud platforms are generally poorly integrated with the network, he says.
He ends his talk by returning to customers and what they want: customers expect networks and services to be always present.
This explains the telcos’ continual marginal growth, he says: “The reason we have this is because there is a big chunk of customers’ lives where they can’t rely upon the network.”
Different thinking is needed if the network is to grow beyond the smartphone. Population coverage is not enough; what is needed is total coverage.
“Wherever I am, I want to use my device, to be connected, for the things that I don’t even know is doing stuff to be able to do them without worrying about connectivity,” he says.
And that is why 6G must be about 100 per cent connectivity,” says McRae: “Either we can do it, or someone else is going to.”
With that, FutureNet comes to ends, and McRae quickly departs to embark on the next chapter in his career. `
Neil McRae will be one of the speakers at the DSP Leaders World Forum, May 23-24, 2023.
OpenLight's CEO on its silicon photonics strategy
Adam Carter, recently appointed the CEO of OpenLight, discusses the company’s strategy and the market opportunities for silicon photonics.
Adam Carter’s path to becoming OpenLight’s first CEO is a circuitous one.
OpenLight, a start-up, offers the marketplace an open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers and gain blocks.
Having worked at Cisco and Oclaro, which was acquired by Lumentum in 2018, Carter decided to take six months off. Covid then hit, prolonging his time out.
Carter returned as a consultant working with firms, including a venture capitalist (VC). The VC alerted him about OpenLight’s search for a CEO.
Carter’s interest in OpenLight was immediate. He already knew the technology and OpenLight’s engineering team and recognised the platform’s market potential.
“If it works in the way I think it can work, it [the platform] could be very interesting for many companies who don’t have access to the [silicon photonics] technology,” says Carter.
Offerings and strategy
OpenLight’s silicon photonics technology originated at Aurrion, a fabless silicon photonics start-up from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Aurrion’s heterogeneous integration silicon photonics technology included III-V materials, enabling lasers to be part of the photonic integrated circuit (PIC).
Juniper Networks bought Aurrion in 2016 and, in 2022, spun out the unit that became OpenLight, with Synopsys joining Juniper in backing the start-up.
OpenLight offers companies two services.
The first is design services for firms with no silicon photonics design expertise. OpenLight will develop a silicon photonics chip to meet the company’s specifications and take the design to production.
“If you don’t have a silicon photonics design team, we will do reference architectures for you,” says Carter.
The design is passed to Tower Semiconductor, a silicon photonics foundry that OpenLight, and before that, Juniper, worked with. Chip prototype runs are wafer-level tested and passed to the customer.
OpenLight gives the company the Graphic Data Stream (GDS) file, which defines the mask set the company orders from Tower for the PIC’s production.
OpenLight also serves companies with in-house silicon photonics expertise that until now have not had access to a silicon photonics process with active components: lasers, semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), and modulators.
The components are part of the process design kit (PDK), the set of files that models a foundry’s fabrication process. A company can choose a PDK that best suits its silicon photonics design for the foundry to then make the device.
OpenLight offers two PDKs via Tower Semiconductor: a Synopsys PDK and one from Luceda Photonics.
OpenLight does not make components, but offers reference designs. OpenLight gets a small royalty with every wafer shipped when a company’s design goes to production.
“They [Tower] handle the purchasing orders, the shipments, and if required, they’ll send it to the test house to produce known good die on each wafer,” says Carter
OpenLight plans to expand the foundries it works with. “You have to give customers the maximum choice,” says Carter.
Design focus
OpenLight’s design team continues to add components to its library.
At the OFC show in March, held in San Diego, OpenLight announced a 224-gigabit indium phosphide optical modulator to enable 200-gigabit optical lanes. OpenLight also demoed an eight-by-100-gigabit transmitter alongside Synopsys’s 112-gigabit serialiser-deserialiser (serdes).
OpenLight also offers a ‘PDK sampler’ for firms to gain confidence in its process and designs.
The sampler comes with two PICs. One PIC has every component offered in OpenLight’s PDK so a customer can probe and compare test results with the simulation models of Tower’s PDKs.
”You can get confidence that the process and the design are stable,” says Carter.
The second PIC is the eight by 100 gigabit DR8 design demoed at OFC.
The company is also working on different laser structures to improve the picojoule-per-bit performance of its existing design.
“Three picojoules per bit will be the benchmark, and it will go lower as we understand more about reducing these numbers through design and process,” says Carter.
The company wants to offer the most updated components via its PDK, says Carter.
OpenLight’s small design team can’t do everything at once, he says: “And if I have to license other people’s designs into my PDK, I will, to make sure my customer has a maximum choice.”
Market opportunities
OpenLight’s primary market focus is communications, an established and significant market that will continue to grow in the coming years.
To that can be added artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, memory, and high-speed computing, says Carter.
“If you listen to companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon, what they’re saying is that most of their investment in hardware is going into what is needed to support AI and machine learning,” says Carter. “There is a race going on right now.”
When AI and machine learning take off, the volumes of optical connections will grow considerably since the interfaces will not just be for networking but also computing, storage, and memory.
“The industry is not quite ready yet to do that ramp at the bandwidths and the densities needed,” he says, but this will be needed in three to four years.
Large contract manufacturers also see volumes coming and are looking at how to offer optical subassembly, he says.
Another market opportunity is telecoms and, in particular coherent optics for metro networks. However, unit volumes will be critical. “Because I am in a foundry, at scale, I have to fill it with wafers,” says Carter.
Simpler coherent designs – ‘coherent lite’ – connecting data centre buildings could be helpful. There is much interest in short-reach connections, for 10km distances, at 1.6 terabit or higher capacity where coherent could be important and deliver large volumes, he says.
Emerging markets for OpenLight’s platform include lidar, where OpenLight is seeing interest, high-performance computing, and healthcare.
“Lidar is different as it is not standardised,” he says. It is a lucrative market, given how the industry has been funded.
OpenLight wants to offer lidar companies early access to components that they need. Many of these companies have silicon photonics design teams but may not have the actives needed for next-generation products, he says.
“I have a thesis that says everywhere a long-wavelength single-mode laser goes is potential for a PIC,” says Carter
Healthcare opportunities include a monitoring PIC placed on a person’s wrist. Carter also cites machine vision, and cell phone makers who want improved camera depth perception in handsets.
Carter is excited by these emerging silicon photonics markets that promise new incremental revenue streams. But timing will be key.
“We have to get into the right market at the right time with the right product,” says Carter. “If we can do that, then there are opportunities to grow and not rely on one market segment.”
As CEO, how does he view success at OpenLight?
“The employees here, some of whom have been here since the start of Aurrion, have never experienced commercial success,” says Carter. “If that happens, and I think it will because that is why I joined, that would be something I could be proud of.”
OpenLight's integrated-laser silicon photonics platform
- OpenLight is an independent silicon photonics company backed by Synopsys and Juniper Networks
- The company was created by carving out the silicon photonics arm of Juniper
- The establishment of OpenLight and its open platform highlights the growing maturity of silicon photonics as new applications emerge beyond datacom and telecom
OpenLight is coming to market with an open silicon photonics platform that includes integrated lasers and gain blocks.
Juniper has a long relationship with Synopsys, using its electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) tools.
So when Juniper said it was spinning out its silicon photonics group, Synopsys was keen to partner. The result is OpenLight, of which Synopsys has a 75 per cent stake costing $67.5 million.
Thomas Mader, OpenLight’s chief operating officer and formerly head of Juniper’s silicon photonics unit, says OpenLight is the first company to offer an open platform that includes monolithically integrated lasers, optical amplifiers and modulators.
Juniper Networks and Synopsys
Juniper gained its silicon photonics technology in 2016 when it acquired Aurrion for $165 million.
Aurrion was a fabless silicon photonics start-up from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a heterogeneous integration silicon photonics process that includes III-V materials, enabling integrated lasers as part of a photonic circuit.
OpenLight is now making this technology available through its partnership with the foundry Tower Semiconductor.
Juniper’s interests are mainly datacom and telecom, but it recognises the emerging opportunities for silicon photonics such as Lidar, optical computing, high-performance computing and optical interconnect.
“With this kind of technology, you want to drive volumes,” says Mader.
Juniper saw spinning out the unit and opening up access to the technology as the best way to drive volumes and reduce costs. The arrangement also benefits Juniper’s own technology needs.
Synopsys, meanwhile, believes it is the right time to back the OpenLight venture.
“We think it [the open platform] is a great opportunity for growth for Synopsys’s EPDA tools,” says John Koeter, senior vice president of marketing and strategy, solutions group at Synopsys.
OpenLight will give Synopsys insight into how the market is evolving and benefit the company’s tools and, eventually, its IP.
Business model
OpenLight is licensing its process design kit (PDK), the files that model Tower’s fabrication process. A company can enter into an agreement with Tower, access the PDK and design its silicon photonics device.
“What we are offering through Tower, and what we spent significant effort developing and showing Tower how to do, is monolithically integrating lasers and optical gain,” says Mader. “Tower is the first time we’re on a volume eight-inch [wafer] process.”
Juniper entered into a partnership with Tower Semiconductor in 2019.
“We are doing the first MPW [multi-project wafer] this summer with Tower on this process,” says Mader.
OpenLight is also providing designs it has developed and validated for several customers. “But we are not selling PICs [photonic integrated circuits]; that is not part of our plan,” says Mader.
OpenLight intends to partner with other foundries to make more widely available integrated-laser designs.
For now, though, OpenLight is focussed on ratifying its roadmap for the next two years.
“We’re going to be busy building out the component library for Tower to keep customers interested because better components make better circuits,” says Daniel Sparacin, vice president of business development and strategy at OpenLight.
OpenLight offers a 100-gigabit modulator and is working on its next-generation 200-gigabit modulator.
“We’re mostly O-band right now, and we have C-band coming up in the roadmap very shortly,” says Sparacin.
Applications
OpenLight has 400 and 800-gigabit optical designs for the data centre to help customers bring to market their PIC developments.
The company is also seeing interest from Lidar customers, particularly those pursuing coherent-based designs.
“The main reason is the integrated laser,” says Mader. “Otherwise, with standard silicon photonics, you have to attach a laser separately, which doesn’t scale well to multiple channels.” That’s because attaching multiple lasers impacts yield.
Lidar also benefits from on-chip optical amplification. “When you have a complex chip, you have a lot of losses,” says Mader.
OpenLight is working with firms pursuing optical computing for machine learning which promises greater power efficiency. “There are several of them coming to us because we can put hundreds or thousands of indium phosphide elements monolithically on a chip,” says Mader.
OpenLight says it has no position regarding co-packaged optics and whether a design uses an external light source or integrated lasers.
It believes co-packaged optics designs will eventually use integrated light sources, but its technology supports both and can even be used to make external light sources.
Overall, OpenLight says it is working with dozens of companies.
Design tools and integration
Synopsys has been an early mover with its integrated optical design automation tools. The tools include:
- OptoCompiler, a photonic IC design environment.
- The OptSim photonic circuit and system simulator.
- The Sentaurus TCAD and RSoft Photonic Device tools for process modelling and device design.
Working closely with OpenLight will benefit Synopsys’s tool environment, says Koeter. Synopsys is adding functionalities and design capabilities to its tools to support the integration of lasers. OpenLight is also providing Synopsys feedback on what will improve the experience of using its design platform.
Synopsys is one of three leading electronic design automation (EDA) tool companies. However, design tools for photonics are a more recent development.
“EDA quite a while ago is where photonic design is now going,” says Mader.
Integration is the underlying trend driving optics.
“We see the scaling already with 400- and 800-gigabit for datacom and some of the other applications; you see the shift to silicon photonics,” says Mader. “The higher the complexity, the more you see it shifting this way because there’s a cost advantage with the integrated laser and optical gain.”
Photonics may not come close to chip designs with billions of transistors. Still, photonic designs that go beyond four-channel design to ones with 32 or 64 channels or optical computing with hundreds or thousands of components are emerging.
“So you see a scaling even though it’s decades behind the electronics field,” says Mader.
With monolithically integrated lasers, yields remain high, whereas scaling a design with discrete components results in unacceptable yields.
“And so we will be able to go where you can’t go otherwise,” says Mader. “It’s not billions, but even dozens [of components] at this point is revolutionary.”
A voyage around work
The first in a series looking at the experience of work in 2019.
Source: Mark Seery
To land your ideal job, the suggestion is first to find your passion. Indeed, one college in the US promises to guide its students to find their life purpose by teaching them three things: what they are good at, what they are passionate about, and what the world needs.
Assuming you are lucky enough to align all three elements, challenges are still likely. How do you maintain a work-life balance? And what happens over time when, despite having fulfilling, challenging work, part of your creative self remains untapped?
This has been the experience of Mark Seery (pictured below), who was a senior staff member at Juniper Networks, responsible for helping shape the networking company’s strategy.
Impetus for change
Seery first felt a murmuring for change in 2015 but only in 2018 did he act.
In 2015, he returned to Australia to spend time with his dying mother. Work commitments were such that his stay was limited. Seery’s mother died a week after he returned to the US and he travelled again to attend the funeral.
Last July he also visited Australia, this time to spend eight days with his brother who was celebrating a birthday. Again, because of work commitments, he felt he couldn’t spend too much time visiting yet the landmark birthday was something he felt he could not miss.
“The idea that work pressure would mentally impinge on even an eight-day stay made me realise my life was not well-balanced,” says Seery.
Just after the trip he informed his manager that he was resigning in order to take a sabbatical. A key motivation for the break was his desire to travel.
Seery chose to make a clean break rather than negotiate time off: “I didn't want to feel that there were any limitations as to what I could do on my sabbatical; I wanted to be free and see where that takes me.”
Source: Mark Seery
A leaving date was set for mid-October, his tenth anniversary at Juniper. “Ten years at Juniper seemed a significant milestone to me,” says Seery.
Since then, Seery has completed the first leg of his travel, visiting eight countries in Asia. And this month he is embarking on a second trip, visiting the Antarctic and Patagonia.
He has also set up his own business, to advise companies on finding their focus.
Career
As a child, Seery’s education was disrupted due to ill health. His first job, at 17, was in banking while at night he studied computer science. Seery credits his mother for encouraging him to pursue computing, a passion since childhood.
Seery’s first opportunity to move from traditional banking to IT involved joining the bank’s network operations. This included automatic teller machines, branch networks and data centre interconnect. “The network operations area, which reminded me of the Star Trek flight deck, drew me to choose network operations,” he says.
He progressed to network operations support, network design and systems programming.
His next step was to leave Australia for the US where he joined several Silicon Valley start-ups, pursuing such technologies as next-generation access, multi-protocol/ virtual routing and all-optical networking.
In 2002, Seery became an analyst, joining market research firm, RHK, that was subsequently acquired by Ovum. And it was while at RHK covering the switching and routing market that he was noticed by Juniper and enticed to join. Juniper’s routing group hired him as they felt he could help on some strategic issues.
From there, he expanded his strategic skills, joining the corporate strategy team where he undertook several roles. These included market intelligence, running CEO staff-level competitive war rooms and creating materials for quarterly company board meetings.
Seery’s role was to help give the company the data it needed to determine how best to meet its goals for the coming year. A company must determine what actions will have the most impact in meeting the targets and must budget in a way to give the best chance of meeting those goals.
“The real struggle in any strategy is how to get it executed,” says Seery. “And an important part of getting it executed is the right allocation of resources.”
Source: Mark Seery
Seery describes how different units in a company - the sales groups, product groups and the CFO office - all have their own views and agendas. The role of the strategy group is to be independent and provide analysis to help the decision makers plot the company’s course.
Corporate war-room work involved more tactical, shorter-term strategy, such as how to improve the performance of a specific business or a product.
Eventful years
Seery’s first years at Juniper were eventful ones. He joined soon after a new CEO who brought with him several senior staff, all from outside the industry. This required a lot of work preparing data and documents so that the company’s senior staff were all on the same page.
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“We all use the term value chain and we all have an idea about what it means. But it is only when you get your hands dirty trying to change the value chain that you really understand what it means.”
In 2009, the market hit a recession after the global financial crisis of 2008. And in 2011, it became clear that the European market was getting worse. Such economic disruptors required a lot of replanning.
It also became clear that the capital expenditure budgets of many of the service providers would no longer be growing and that the biggest part of their spending would go on the radio part of their networks. “The thing you did best is not going to grow anymore. What does that mean for the company?” says Seery.
Source: Mark Seery
And then there were new developments that occupied Seery as part of his business model strategy role.
One was the observation that software was becoming increasingly important, coupled with the huge disruption that is the cloud. Such developments had to be translated in terms of their significance for Juniper.
He also had to grapple with the idea - one affecting companies across many industries - that recurring revenue such as from subscriptions may benefit a company’s evaluation on Wall Street more than that of a company selling products only. Issues to be addressed here include how such a change would affect the company’s revenues, the operational changes required, the products Juniper should develop for such a model, and how to enable the sales force to sell such products.
“We all use the term value chain and we all have an idea about what it means,” says Seery. “But it is only when you get your hands dirty trying to change the value chain that you really understand what it means.”
The business model work was a big change for Seery, shifting him from a highly analytical role to one that involved engaging with many functions of the company.
His growing disquiet at Juniper wasn’t due to the stress of needing to continually produce deliverables, nor the demanding nature of his work. “It was more a feeling that I was missing out on something else,” he says.
Parting
Seery provides a multifaceted answer as to why he decided to resign.
First, his work on business modelling had been largely defined and was moving to the operational phase. It meant his day-to-day involvement was no longer required. This led him to question what he wanted to do next.
He also felt that, for a long time, part of him remained unfulfilled. “In a corporate context, there are certain expectations, the scope of things you talk about, the scope of things you express,” he says. “People in a corporate environment don't really care about some of the bigger issues you have as a human being.”
Companies focus on meeting targets each quarter and your life can become all-consuming to fulfil that ongoing short-term goal. The result, he says, is that a part of you gets pushed aside.
Source: Mark Seery
“You make a lot of sacrifices on things you are passionate about; things you enjoy,” says Seery. “If what you are passionate about is driving a business, then great, but not all of us are made that simply.”
Seery has spoken to people who have been more successful at managing their work-life balance. “Could I have have found a better balance in my ten years at Juniper? Maybe, but the fact is I didn't.”
It is these issues that led Seery to identify what was important to him and to focus on that.
Seery admits the decision to leave a secure and well-paid position at Juniper was extremely hard. But he says that he has a great appreciation and gratitude for the affluence he has already achieved, reinforced by his travel experiences.
One of the today's great challenges is ever-increasing consumption. The key is to step back and be grateful for what you already have, he says: “There is nothing wrong with striving for more, but craving for it and comparing yourself to others can be a trap.”
Travel
Travel is something Seery did repeatedly when he was younger but it inevitably dwindled with work and family commitments.
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“One young man in Myanmar told him that his fishing village didn’t have electricity till 2008 and didn’t have the internet till 2010”
For him, travel is a way to understand the human experience through other people’s stories. “I find when I travel, it has a real impact on me,” he says.
Seery worked with a travel company to plan his itinerary for the South East Asia trip, including having local guides in each town he visited.
“I had a structured itinerary with dates and places, though I had the ability to change what I wanted to do on any given day,” says Seery. “Having some structure and predictability is helpful when you have a family at home worrying about you.”
Source: Mark Seery
South East Asia
Seery had travelled via work to developed parts of Asia including China, Japan and South Korea. But travelling through less developed parts of Asia is a very different experience, he says.
He spoke to one young man while visiting Myanmar who told him that his fishing village didn't have electricity till 2008 and didn't have the internet till 2010.
Villagers continue to cook with fire rather than using an electric stove, claiming they don’t know how to use one, however, it could be that they can’t afford one, he says. They also use hay for one cooking effect and wood for another.
“The young man told me that the village had had no visibility into protests taking place in cities across the country until the advent of the internet. “They use Facebook, not Google, as a search engine, to see videos and get information about what is going on,” says Seery. “In the modern context, with everything that is going on with Facebook, we probably think that is somewhat scary.”
But the young man added he’d rather get on Facebook and talk to someone who lives in a city and ask them what is going on than trust what the Government tells him. “An interesting insight into why they view Facebook as a credible source of information,” says Seery.
Other examples of the impact of the internet include the way football is viewed. Before mobile data, villagers had to pay one villager that owned a huge satellite dish to watch an English Premier League match. Now they all watch on their phones.
Seery also highlights the ongoing tension between traditional life and modernity. He tells how when visiting rural villages in Laos one is struck by the poverty and lack of modern conveniences. It is easy to judge and wonder how they enjoy living there, he says, but they do.
However, the long-standing tradition of the elders sharing the history of the tribe and life stories around a campfire is changing. “Now, you get around the campfire and some kid with a cellphone is telling everybody what is going on in the rest of the world,” says Seery. “They are all very happy with how they are living until they find out how other people are living.”
Seery originally planned to be in Asia for a month but after talking with his wife and son who were about to oversee some home renovations, they all concluded that he should extend his trip. So he joined a tour group as part of the India and Nepal leg of his journey that extended the trip by several weeks.
What next?
The imminent trip to Antarctica will last 12 days with five days required to travel between Antarctica and Latin America. Once at the Antarctic, two nights will be spent camping on the ice, and there will be snowshoe walking. There are also Zodiac boats and options for kayaking and mountaineering.
In Patagonia, the trip will involve a three-day hike, an overnight horse-riding and camping trip, and several shorter hiking trips.
Seery’s new venture is a consultancy and research company called Bohcay. “It is a play on the photography term, Bokeh, the soft blurring you get behind a portrait,” says Seery.
The company’s aim is to help clients retain a systematic focus on what is important in terms of what they are doing, he says. Seery is in the process of closing his first customer for a short engagement.
“It is all part of exploring what I want to do after I finish my travel,” says Seery.
People that have met Seery since his return from his Asia trip comment on how he has lost weight and looks more relaxed. He is also exercising regularly, something that was only episodic during his time working.
He himself feels a weight has been lifted by no longer being burdened by the thought of sacrificing what he really wants to do.
“The more I travel, the more I will feel I have addressed that thing that was going on with me,” he says.
Further information
Bohcay website, click here
Mark Seery’s travel blog, click here
Juniper bolsters its MX routers with packet processing ASIC
Juniper Networks has developed its next-generation packet processor, a single-chip package that includes 3D-stacked high-bandwidth memory. The device’s first use will be to enhance three of Juniper’s flagship MX series edge routers.
The company has also announced software for the 5G cellular standard that separates the control and user planes, known as CUPS, and two new MX-series platforms that will use the company’s universal chassis.
The company’s MX series edge routers were first introduced in 2007. “The MX is a platform that is at the heart of our service provider customers globally, as well as a number of our cloud provider and enterprise customers,” says Sally Bament, Juniper’s vice president of service provider marketing (pictured).
The latest enhancements will provide the MX edge router customers with another decade of support to meet their evolving service requirements, says Bament.
Source: Gazettabyte, Juniper Networks
Penta silicon
Juniper’s latest single-chip packet processor has a 500 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) duplex throughput and is implemented using a 16nm CMOS process. This compares to Juniper’s existing 120Gbps duplex 65nm CMOS Trio packet processor that is a four-device chipset that powers the MX platforms and was unveiled in 2009. The single packaged chip with its 3D-stacked memory reduces packaging by 83 per cent compared to the four-chip Trio chipset.
The Penta is being readied for the advent of 400–gigabit client-side interfaces and features 50Gbps serialiser/ deserialisers (serdes).
Juniper will use the Penta Silicon on its latest MPC10E linecard that has a capacity of 1.5 terabit-per-second (Tbps). The linecard will be used to enhance its MX240, MX480 and MX960 edge routers. The current MPC7E linecard, powered by the Trio, has a 480Gbps capacity.
The MPC10E linecard showing the client interface options and the three Penta ICs. Source: Juniper Networks
The company highlights the Penta programmability, enabling it to accommodate new emerging routing protocols.
The custom chip is also the first with hardware acceleration for Layer 2 MACsec and Layer 3 IPsec encryption protocols, claims Juniper.
“The benefit [of hardware acceleration] is that you don’t have to trade off encryption with processing performance and scale,” says Bament. “We can terminate thousands of IPSec sessions without any performance impact.”
The Penta also supports the FlexEthernet standard.
CUPS
Juniper claims it is the first vendor to implement CUPS, developed by the 3GPP standards body.
CUPS stands for Control and User Plane Separation of Evolved Packet Core (EPC) nodes. “By decoupling the control and user planes, you can scale them independently,” says Bament.
Such a separation brings several benefits. CUPS can be used to reduce latency by moving user plane nodes closer to the radio access network. Low latency is required to enable emerging network edge applications such as self-driving cars and virtual reality-augmented reality.
Adding more user plane nodes will also help service providers cope with the continual increase in mobile data traffic. AT&T says data in its mobile network has grown 3,600x since 2007 and it expects a further near-10x growth by 2022.
With CUPS, service providers can combine different vendors’ control plane and user plane solutions in their network. “We can now interoperate with third-party 5G control planes from vendors,” says Bament. Juniper already partners with Affirmed Networks, a virtualised 5G control plane vendor.
Service providers also have a choice for the user plane itself: they can use physical hardware such as Juniper’s MX platforms or virtualised user plane solutions from third-party vendors, or both solutions in their networks.
Universal chassis
Juniper has also unveiled two additional MX platforms that use its universal chassis announced a year ago. Having a universal chassis simplifies inventory management and operational costs.
The common chassis is already used for Juniper’s PTX packet transport core routers and its QFX switches for the data centres. At the time of the universal chassis launch, Juniper said it would also support MX linecards.
The two new MX edge routers using the universal platform are the MX10008 and MX10016. The 13 rack unit (13RU) MX10008 has a 19.2-terabit capacity while the 21RU MX10016 doubles it to 38.4 terabits.
White boxes
The leading service providers are increasingly promoting the adoption of white boxes yet the Juniper announcement includes all the classical elements of traditional telecom equipment: chassis, line cards and custom silicon.
“There is certainly a trend towards white-box implementations and certainly customers are buying software from us and putting it on white boxes,” says Bament. “But it is limited; there is still a way to go in terms of broad adoption.”
Bament points to Juniper’s software-based vMX virtual edge routing solution as well as its CUPS software to show that it is pursuing virtual network function solutions as well as enhancing its MX platforms to benefit service providers’ existing investments.
The two MX platforms will be available in the second half of this year, the Penta ASIC-based MPC10E line card for the MX240, MX480 and MX960 will be available in the first quarter of next year while the CUPS software is due in the first half of 2019.
Further information
Juniper Trio white paper, click here
Verizon, Ciena and Juniper trial 400 Gigabit Ethernet
Verizon has sent a 400 Gigabit Ethernet signal over its network, carried using a 400-gigabit optical wavelength.
The trial’s goal was to demonstrate multi-vendor interoperability and in particular the interoperability of standardised 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) client signals.
Glenn Wellbrock“[400GbE] Interoperability with the client side has been the long pole in the tent - and continues to be,” says Glenn Wellbrock, director, optical transport network - architecture, design and planning at Verizon. “This was trial equipment, not generally-available equipment.”
It is only the emergence of standardised modules - in this case, an IEEE 400GbE client-side interface specification - that allows multi-vendor interoperability, he says.
By trialing a 400-gigabit lightpath, Verizon also demonstrated the working of a dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) flexible grid, and a baud rate nearly double the 32-35Gbaud in wide use for 100-gigabit and 200-gigabit wavelengths.
“It shows we can take advantage of the entire system; we don’t have to stick to 50GHz channel spacing anymore,” says Wellbrock.
[400GbE] Interoperability with the client side has been the long pole in the tent - and continues to be
Trial set-up
The trial used Juniper Networks’ PTX5000 packet transport router and Ciena’s 6500 packet-optical platform, equipment already deployed in Verizon’s network.
The Verizon demonstration was not testing optical transmission reach. Indeed the equipment was located in two buildings in Richardson, within the Dallas area. Testing the reach of 400-gigabit wavelengths will come in future trials, says Wellbrock.
The PTX5000 core router has a traffic capacity of up to 24 terabits and supports 10-gigabit, 40-gigabit and 100-gigabit client-side interfaces as well as 100-gigabit coherent interfaces for IP-over-DWDM applications. The PTX5000 uses a mother card on which sits one or more daughter cards hosting the interfaces, what Juniper calls a flexible PIC concentrator (FPC) and physical interface cards (PICs), respectively.
Juniper created a PIC with a 400GbE CFP8 pluggable module implementing the IEEE’s 10km 400GBASE-LR8 standard.
“For us, it was simply creating a demo 400-gigabit pluggable line card to go into the line card Verizon has already deployed,” says Donyel Jones-Williams, director of product marketing management at Juniper Networks.
Donyel Jones-WilliamsThe CFP8 400GbE interface connected the router to Ciena’s 6500 packet-optical platform.
Ciena also used demonstration hardware developed for 400-gigabit trials. “We expect to develop other hardware for general deployment,” says Helen Xenos, senior director, portfolio marketing at Ciena. “We are looking at smaller form-factor pluggables to carry 400 Gigabit Ethernet.”
400-gigabit deployments and trials
Ciena started shipping its WaveLogic Ai coherent modem that implements 400-gigabit wavelengths in the third quarter of 2017. Since then, the company has announced several 400-gigabit deployments and trials.
Vodafone New Zealand deployed 400 gigabits in its national transport network last September, a world first, claims Ciena. German cable operator, Unitymedia, has also deployed Ciena’s WaveLogic Ai coherent modem to deliver a flexible grid and 400-gigabit wavelengths to support growing content delivered via its data centres. And JISC, which runs the UK’s national research and education network, has deployed the 6500 platform and is using 400-gigabit wavelengths.
Helen Xenos
Last September, AT&T conducted its own 400-gigabit trial with Ciena. With AT&T’s trial, the 400-gigabit signal was generated using a test bed. “An SDN controller was used to provision the circuit and the [400-gigabit] signal traversed an OpenROADM line system,” says Xenos.
Using the WaveLogic Ai coherent modem and its support for a 56Gbaud rate means that tunable capacity can now be doubled across applications, says Xenos. The wavelength capacity used for long-haul distances can now be 200 gigabits instead of 100 gigabits, while metro-regional networks spanning 1,000km can use 300-gigabit wavelengths. Meanwhile, 400-gigabit lightpaths suit distances of several hundred kilometres.
It is the large data centre operators that are driving the majority of 400 gigabit deployments, says Ciena. The reason the 400-gigabit announcements relate to telecom operators is because the data centre players have not gone public with their deployments, says Xenos.
Juniper Networks’ PTX5000 core router with 400GbE interfaces will primarily be used by the telecom operators. “We are in trials with other providers on 400 gigabits,” says Jones-Williams. “Nothing is public as yet.”
Juniper Networks opens up the optical line system
Juniper Networks has responded to the demands of the large-scale data centre players with an open optical line system architecture.
Donyel Jones-WilliamsThe system vendor has created software external to its switch, IP router and optical transport platforms that centrally controls the optical layer.
Juniper has also announced a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) - the TCX1000 - that is Lumentum’s own white box ROADM design. Juniper will offer the Lumentum white box as its own, part of its optical product portfolio.
The open line system architecture, including the TCX1000, is also being pitched to communications service providers that want an optical line system and prefer to deal with a single vendor.
“Juniper plans to address the optical layer with a combination of software and open hardware in the common optical layer,” says Andrew Schmitt, founder and lead analyst at Cignal AI. “This is the solution it will bring to customers rather than partnering with an optical vendor, which Juniper has tried several times without great success.”
Open line systems
An optical line system comprises terminal and transmission equipment and network management software. The terminal equipment refers to coherent optics hosted on platforms, while line elements such as filters, optical amplifiers and ROADMs make up the transmission equipment. Traditionally, a single vendor has provided all these elements with the network management software embedded within the vendor’s platforms.
An open optical line system refers to line equipment and the network management system from a vendor such as Nokia, Infinera or Ciena that allows the attachment of independent terminal equipment. An example would be the Telecom Infra Project’s Voyager box linked to a Nokia line system, says Schmitt.
The open line system can also be implemented as a disaggregated design. Here, says Schmitt, the control software would be acquired from a vendor such as Juniper, Fujitsu, or Ciena with the customer buying open ROADMs, amplifiers and filters from various vendors before connecting them. Open software interfaces are used to communicate with these components. And true to an open line system, any terminal equipment can be connected.
The advantage of an open disaggregated optical line system is that elements can be bought from various sources to avoid vendor lock-in. It also allows the best components to be acquired and upgraded as needed.
Meanwhile, disaggregating the management and control software from the optical line system and equipment appeals to the way the internet content providers architect and manage their large-scale data centres. This is what Juniper’s proNX Optical Director platform enables, the second part of its open line system announcement.
Juniper believes its design is an industry first in how it separates the control plane from the optical hardware.
“We have taken the concept of disaggregation and software-defined networking to separate the control plane out of the hardware,” says Donyel Jones-Williams, director of product marketing management at Juniper Networks. “Our control plane is no longer tied to physical hardware.”
Having an open line system supplied by one vendor gets you 90% of the way there
Disaggregated control benefits the optimisation of the open line system, and enables flexible updates without disrupting the service.
Cignal AI’s Schmitt says that the cloud and co-location players are already using open line systems just not disaggregated ones.
“Having an open line system supplied by one vendor gets you 90% of the way there,” says Schmitt. For him, a key question is what problem is being solved by taking this one step further and disaggregating the hardware.
Schmitt’s view is that an operator introduces a lot of complexity into the network for the marginal benefit of picking hardware suppliers independently. “And realistically they are still single-sourcing the software from a vendor like Juniper or Ciena,” says Schmitt.
Juniper now can offer an open line system, and if a customer wants a disaggregated one, it can build it. “I don’t think users will choose to do that,” says Schmitt. “But Juniper is in a great position to sell the right open line system technology to its customer base and this announcement is interesting and important because Juniper is clearly stating this is the path it plans to take.”
TCX1000 and proNX
Juniper’s open optical line system announcement is the latest development in its optical strategy since it acquired optical transport firm, BTI Systems, in 2016.
BTI’s acquisition provided Juniper with a line system for 100-gigabit transport. “The filters and ROADMs didn’t allow the system to scale to 200-gigabit and 400-gigabit line rates and to support super-channels and flexgrid,” says Jones-Williams.
With the TCX1000, Juniper now has a one-rack-unit 20-degree ROADM that is colourless, directionless and which supports flexgrid to enable 400-gigabit, 600-gigabit and even higher capacity optical channels in future. The TCX1000 supports up to 25.6 terabits-per-second per line.
A customer can also buy the white box ROADM from Lumentum directly, says Juniper. “It gives our customers freedom as to how they want to source their product,” says Jones-Williams.
Competition between vendors is now in the software domain. We no longer believe that there is differentiation in the optical line system hardware
Juniper’s management and control software, the ProNX Optical Director, has been architected using microservices. Microservices offers a way to architect applications using virtualisation technology. Each application is run in isolation based on the service they provide. This allows a service to run and scale independently while application programming interfaces (APIs) enable communication with other services.
Container technology is used to implement microservices. Containers use fewer hardware resources than virtual machines, an alternative approach to server virtualisation.
Source: Juniper Networks.
“It is built for data centre operators,” says Don Frey, principal analyst, routers and transport at the market research firm, Ovum. “Microservices makes the product more modular.”
Juniper believes the competition between vendors is now in the software domain. “We no longer believe that there is differentiation in the optical line system hardware,” says Jones-Williams.
Data centre operators are not concerned about line system interoperability, they are just trying to remove the blade lock-in so they can get the latest technology.
Market demands
Most links between data centres are point-to-point networks yet despite that, the internet content providers are interested in ROADMs, says Juniper. What they want is to simplify network design using the ROADM’s colourless and flexible grid attributes. A directionless ROADM is only needed for complex hub sites that require flexibility in moving wavelengths through a mesh network.
The strategy of the large-scale data centre operators is to split the optical system between an open line system and purpose-built blades. The split allows them to upgrade to the best blades or pluggable optics while leaving the core untouched. “The concept is similar to the open submarine cables as the speed of innovation in core systems is not the same as the line optics,” says Frey. “Data centre operators are not concerned about line system interoperability, they are just trying to remove the blade lock-in so they can get the latest technology.”
Juniper says there is also interest from communications service providers in the ROADM as part of their embrace of open initiatives such as the Open ROADM MSA. Frey says AT&T will make its first deployment of the Open ROADM before the year-end or in early 2018.
“There are a lot of synergies in terms of what we have announced and things like Open ROADM,” says Jones-Williams. “But we know that there are customers out there that just want a line system and they do not care if it is open or not.”
Juniper is already working with customers with its open line system as part of the development of its proNX software.
The branded ROADM and the proNX Optical Director will be generally available in early 2018.
Telefónica tackles video growth with IP-MPLS network
- Telefónica’s video growth in one year has matched nine years of IP traffic growth
- Optical mesh network in Barcelona will use CDC-ROADMs and 200-gigabit coherent line cards
Telefónica has started testing an optical mesh network in Barcelona, adding to its existing optical mesh deployment across Madrid. Both mesh networks are based on 200-gigabit optical channels and high-degree reconfigurable add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs) that are part of the optical infrastructure that underpins the operator’s nationwide IP-MPLS network that is now under construction.
Maria Antonia CrespoThe operator decided to become a video telco company in late 2014 to support video-on-demand and over-the-top streaming video services.
Telefónica realised its existing IP and aggregation networks would not be able to accommodate the video traffic growth and started developing its IP-MPLS network.
“What we are seeing is that the traffic is growing very quickly,” says Maria Antonia Crespo, IP and optical networking director at Telefónica. “In one year we are getting the same
figures as we got from internet traffic in the last nine years.”
The operator is rolling out the IP-MPLS network across Spain. Juniper Networks and Nokia are the suppliers of the IP router equipment, while Huawei and Nokia were chosen to supply the optical networking equipment.
IP-MPLS
Telefónica set about reducing the number of layers and number of hops when designing its IP-MPLS network. “At each hop, we have to invest money if we want to increase capacity,” says Crespo.
The result is an IP-MPLS network comprising four layers (see diagram). The uppermost Layer 1, dubbed HL1, connects the network to the internet world, while HL2 is a backbone transit layer. The HL3 layer is also a transit layer but at the provincial level. Spain is made up of 52 provinces. HL4 is where the services will reside, where Telefonica will deliver such services as Layer 2 and Layer 3 virtual private networks.
Between HL1 and HL2 is a national GMPLS-based photonic mesh, says Crespo, and between HL3 and HL4 there are the metro mesh networks. “Now we are deploying two GMPLS-based mesh networks, in Madrid and Barcelona,” she says. “Then, in the rest of the country, we are deploying [optical] rings.”
Systems requirements
Telefónica says it had several requirements when choosing the optical transport equipment, requirements common to both its backbone and regional networks.
One is the need to scale capacity at 10 gigabits and 100 gigabits, while network availability and robustness are also key. Telefónica says its network is designed to withstand two or more simultaneous fibre failures. “We have long experience with the GMPLS control plane to support different fibre impairments in the network,” says Alberto Colomer, optical technology manager at Telefónica.
The operator also wants its equipment to support high-speed interfaces and more granular rates to allow it to transition away from legacy traffic such as SDH and 1GbE. Operational improvements are another requirement: Telefónica wants to reduce the manual intervention its network needs. Optical time-domain reflectometers (OTDR) are being integrated into the network to monitor the fibre, as is the ability to automatically equalise the different optical channels.
Alberto ColomerLastly, Telefónica is looking to reduce its capital expenditure and operational expense. It is deploying flexible rate 200-gigabit transponders in its Barcelona and Madrid networks and the same line cards will support 400-gigabit and even 1 terabit channels in future, as well as flexible grid to support the most efficient use of a fibre’s spectrum.
The 200-gigabit transponders use 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM). Such transponders have enough reach to span each of the two cities but Colomer says Telefónica is still studying how many ROADM stages the 16-QAM transponders can cross.
It is like a pilot changing the engines while flying a plane
The ROADMs Telefónica is deploying in Madrid are directionless and are able to support up to 20 degrees. “You need some connectivity inside the mesh but also the mesh has to be connected to rings that cover all the counties around Madrid,” says Colomer.
Barcelona will be the first location where the ROADMs will also be colourless and contentionless (CDC-ROADMs). “We need to understand in a better way what are the advantages that come with that functionality,” says Colomer.
Telefónica has deployed Huawei’s Optix OSN 9800 platform in Madrid while in Barcelona Nokia’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch with the latest PSE-2 Coherent DSP-ASIC technology is being deployed.
Nokia’s PSS-1830 is designed to support the L-band as well as the C-band but Telefonica does not see the need for the L-band in the near future. “We are going in the direction of increasing capacity per channel: 400-gigabit channels and one terabit channels,” says Colomer. By deploying a photonic mesh and high-degree ROADMs, it will also be possible to increase capacity on a specific link by adding a fibre pair.
Status
The mesh in Madrid is already completed while Telefónica is deploying optical rings around Barcelona while it tests the contentionless ROADMs. These deployments are aligned with the IP-MPLS deployment, says Crespo, which is expected to be completed by 2018.
Crespo says the nationwide IP-MPLS rollout is a challenge. The deployment involves learning new technology that needs to be deployed alongside its existing network. "My boss likens it to a pilot changing the engines while flying a plane," says Crespo. "We are testing in the labs, duplicating it [the network], and migrating the traffic without impacting the customer."