ON2020 rallies industry to address networking concerns

Peter Winzer highlights one particular slide, part of the operator-findings presentation, to explain the purpose of the Optical Networks 2020 (ON2020) group.

Source: ON2020

The slide shows how router-blade client interfaces are scaling at 40% annually compared to the 20% growth rate of general single-wavelength interfaces (see chart).

Extrapolating the trend to 2024, router blades will support 20 terabits while client interfaces will only be at one terabit. Each blade will thus require 20 one-terabit Ethernet interfaces. “That is science fiction if you go off today’s technology,” says Winzer, director of optical transmission subsystems research at Nokia Bell Labs and a member of the ON2020 steering committee.

This is where ON2020 comes in, he says, to flag up such disparities and focus industry efforts so they are addressed.

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The white box concept gets embraced at the optical layer

Lumentum has unveiled several optical white-box designs. To date the adoption of white boxes - pizza-box sized platforms used in large-scale data centres - has been at the electronic layer, for switching and routing applications.

Brandon Collings

White boxes have arisen to satisfy the data centre operators’ need for simple building-block functions in large number that they can direct themselves.  

“They [data centre operators] started using very simple white boxes - rather simple functionality, much simpler than the large router companies were providing - which they controlled themselves using software-defined networking orchestrators,” says Brandon Collings, CTO of Lumentum. 

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JDSU's Brandon Collings on silicon photonics, optical transport & the tunable SFP+

JDSU's CTO for communications and commercial optical products, Brandon Collings, discusses reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), 100 Gigabit, silicon photonics, and the status of JDSU's tunable SFP+.

"We have been continually monitoring to find ways to use the technology [silicon photonics] for telecom but we are not really seeing that happen”

Brandon Collings, JDSU

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Rational and innovative times: JDSU's CTO Q&A Part II

Brandon Collings, JDS Uniphase's CTO for communications and commercial optical products, talks about fostering innovation and what is coming after 100 Gigabit optical transmission. Part II of a Q&A with Gazettabyte.

"What happens after 100 Gig is going to be very interesting"

Brandon Collings (right), JDSU

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Q&A with JDSU's CTO

In Part 1 of a Q&A with Gazettabyte, Brandon Collings, JDS Uniphase's CTO for communications and commercial optical products, reflects on the key optical networking developments of the coming decade, how the role of optical component vendors is changing and next-generation ROADMs. 

"For transmission components, photonic integration is the name of the game. If you are not doing it, you are not going to be a player"

Brandon Collings (left), JDSU

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