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

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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

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OTN hardware gets the 100 Gigabit treatment

AppliedMicro’s TPACK unit has unveiled the first of its 100 Gigabit Optical Transport Network (OTN) designs. Two devices were announced in November 2010 - the TPOT414 and TPOT424 - that perform 100 Gigabit mapping and framing functions, while in December a 100 Gigabit OTN muxponder (multiplexer-transponder) was announced that combines several of its designs.

 “The real market demand is for simple systems - the transponder and interfaces to the routers"

Lars Pedersen, AppliedMicro

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