ECOC 2024 industry reflections - Final Part

In the final part, industry figures share their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Contributions are from Adtran’s Jörg-Peter Elbers, Lightwave Logic’s Michael Lebby, and Heavy Reading’s Sterling Perrin.

ECOC exhibition floor

Jörg-Peter Elbers, senior vice presendent, advanced technology, standards and IPR, Adtran, and a General Chair at this year’s ECOC.

ECOC celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. It was great to see scientists, engineers, and industry leaders from all around the globe at a vibrant gathering in Frankfurt.

ECOC dates to September 1975 when the inaugural event – dubbed the “European Conference on Optical Fiber Technology” - was held in London. In the early days, the focus was on megabit-per-second transmission for telephony applications. Now, we are advancing to petabit-per-second speeds to meet AI and cloud services demands. 

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections - Part III

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are contributions from Aloe Semiconductor's Chris Doerr, Hacene Chaouch of Arista Networks, and Lumentum's Marc Stiller.

Autumn morning near the ECOC congress centre in Frankfurt

Chris Doerr, CEO of Aloe Semiconductor

If there was one overall message from ECOC 2024 this year, it is that incumbent technologies are winning in the communications market.

Copper is not giving up. It consumes less power and is cheaper than optics, and now, more electronics such as retimers are being applied to keep direct-attach copper (DAC) cables going.  Also, 200-plus gigabaud (GBd) made a debut in coherent optics, but in intensity-modulation direct-detect (IMDD), 50GBd and 100GBd look like they are here to stay for several more years.

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Is 6G’s fate to repeat the failings of 5G wireless?

Will the telecom industry embark on another costly wireless upgrade? Telecom consultant and author William Webb thinks so and warns that it risks repeating what happened with 5G. 

William Webb

William Webb published the book The 5G Myth in 2016. In it, he warned that the then-emerging 5G standard would prove costly and fail to deliver on the bold promises made for the emerging wireless technology.

Webb sees history repeating itself with 6G, the next wireless standard generation. In his latest book, The 6G Manifesto, he reflects on the emerging standard and outlines what the industry and its most significant stakeholder - the telecom operators - could do instead.

Developing a new generation wireless standard every decade has proved beneficial, says Webb. However, the underlying benefits with each generation has diminished to the degree that, with 5G, it is questionable whether the latest generation was needed.

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First 50G-PON merchant silicon spurs operator trials

Broadcom has unveiled the industry’s first merchant silicon for the 50-gigabit passive optical network (50G-PON) access standard. Until now, only access equipment players such as Huawei and ZTE had their own 50G-PON silicon.  

A 50G-PON network. Source: Adtran.

Broadcom has announced two 50G-PON devices: an optical line terminal (OLT) chip and the optical networking unit (ONU) 50-PON port to the users.  Both chips include custom hardware from Broadcom to run artificial intelligence (AI) machine-learning algorithms. 

Jim Muth, senior manager of product marketing at Broadcom, says supporting AI benefits the operator and the quality of the end user’s broadband service. 

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections - Part II

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are contributions from Nubis Communications' Dan Harding, imec's Peter Ossieur, and Chris Cole.

Dan Harding, CEO, Nubis Communications

Our biggest takeaway from ECOC is the increased confidence not just in 200-gigabit electrical and optical interfaces but also in 400 gigabit. It is becoming clear that in 2025 and 2026, the industry will broadly launch platforms using a 200 gigabit per lane serdes [serialiser/deserialiser interfaces] that will connect to 200 gigabit per lane optics.

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are the first contributions from Huawei's Maxim Kuschnerov, Coherent's Vipul Bhatt, and Broadcom's Rajiv Pancholy.

Source: Shutterstock

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

At ECOC, my main interest concerned the evolution of data centre networking to 400 gigabits per lane for optics and electronics. Historically, the adoption of new optical line rates always preceded the serdes electrical interconnects but now copper cables are likely to drive much of the leading development work at 400 gigabit per lane.

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Pluggable optics in need of a makeover

Current pluggable optics have stunted optical innovation for the last decade. So argues Chris Cole, industry veteran and an advisor at start-up Quintessent.

Chris Cole

Cole calls for a new form factor supporting hundreds of electrical and optical channels. In a workshop on massively parallel optics held at the recent ECOC conference and exhibition in Frankfurt, he outlined other important specifications such a module should have.

Cole, working with other interested parties in the new form factor, will present their proposal to the OIF industry body at its next meeting in November.

"I'm very optimistic it will be approved," says Cole.

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