OFC 2024 industry reflections: Part 2

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent OFC show in San Diego. Here are the thoughts from Ciena, Celestial AI and Heavy Reading.

Dino DiPerna, Senior Vice President, Global Research and Development at Ciena.

Power efficiency was a key theme at OFC this year. Although it has been a prevalent topic for some time, it stood out more than usual at OFC 2024 as the industry strives to make further improvements.

There was a vast array of presentations focused on power efficiency gains and technological advancements, with sessions highlighting picojoule-per-bit (pJ/b) requirements, high-speed interconnect evolution including co-packaged optics (CPO), linear pluggable optics (LPO), and linear retimer optics (LRO), as well as new materials like thin-film lithium niobate, coherent transceiver evolution, and liquid cooling.

Click to read more ...

Infinera buying Coriant will bring welcome consolidation

Infinera is to purchase privately-held Coriant for $430 million. The deal will effectively double Infinera’s revenues, add 100 new customers and expand the systems vendor’s product portfolio.

Infinera's CEO, Tom FallonBut industry analysts, while welcoming the consolidation among optical systems suppliers, highlight the challenges Infinera faces making the Coriant acquisition a success.   

“The low price reflects that this isn't the best asset on the market,” says Sterling Perrin, principal analyst, optical networking and transport at Heavy Reading. “They are buying $1 of revenue for 50 cents; the price reflects the challenges.”   

Click to read more ...

Ciena shops for photonic technology for line-side edge

Briefing: DWDM developments

Part 3: Acquisitions and silicon photonics

Ciena is to acquire the high-speed photonics components division of Teraxion for $32 million. The deal includes 35 employees and Teraxion’s indium phosphide and silicon photonics technologies. The systems vendor is making the acquisition to benefit its coherent-based packet-optical transmission systems in metro and long-haul networks.

Sterling Perrin

“Historically Ciena has been a step ahead of others in introducing new coherent capabilities to the market,” says Ron Kline, principal analyst, intelligent networks at market research company, Ovum. “The technology is critical to own if they want to maintain their edge.”

“Bringing in-house not everything, just piece parts, are becoming differentiators,” says Sterling Perrin, senior analyst at Heavy Reading.    

Ciena designs its own WaveLogic coherent DSP-ASICs but buys its optical components. Having its own photonics design team with expertise in indium-phosphide and silicon photonics will allow Ciena to develop complete line-side systems, optimising the photonics and electronics to benefit system performance.

Click to read more ...

Books in 2015 - Final Part

The final part of what industry figures have been reading in 2015 - Part 3 of 3

Sterling Perring, senior analyst, Heavy Reading  

My ambitions to read far exceed my actual reading output, and because I have such a backlog of books on my reading list, I generally don’t read the latest.

Source: The Age of Spiritual Machines

I have long been fascinated by a graphic from futurist Ray Kurweil which depicts the exponential growth of computing and plots it against living intelligence. The graphic is from Kurzweil’s 1999 book on artificial intelligence The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, which I read in 2015.

Click to read more ...

P-OTS 2.0: 60s interview with Heavy Reading's Sterling Perrin

Heavy Reading has surveyed over 100 operators worldwide about their packet optical transport plans. Sterling Perrin, senior analyst at Heavy Reading, talks about the findings.

Click to read more ...

Optical industry restructuring: The analysts' view

The view that the optical industry is due a shake-up has been aired periodically over the last decade. Yet the industry's structure has remained intact. Now, with the depressed state of the telecom industry, the spectre of impending restructuring is again being raised.

In Part 2, Gazettabyte asked several market research analysts - Heavy Reading's Sterling Perrin, Ovum's Daryl Inniss and Dell'Oro's Jimmy Yu - for their views.

Part II: The analysts' view

"It is just a very slow, grinding process of adjustment; I am not sure that the next five years will be any different to what we've seen"

Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading

Click to read more ...

ROADMs: core role, modest return for component players

Next-generation reconfigurable optical add/ drop multiplexers (ROADMs) will perform an important role in simplifying network operation but optical component vendors making the core component  - the wavelength-selective switch (WSS) - on which such ROADMs will be based should expect a limited return for their efforts.

"[Component suppliers] are going to be under extreme constraints on pricing and cost"

Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading

Click to read more ...