China Mobile plots 400 Gigabit trials in 2017

China Mobile is preparing to trial 400-gigabit transmission in the backbone of its optical network in 2017. The planned trials were detailed during a keynote talk given by Jiajin Gao, deputy general manager at China Mobile Technology, at the OIDA Executive Forum, an OSA event hosted at OFC, held in Los Angeles last week.

The world's largest operator will trial two 400-gigabit variants: polarisation-multiplexed, quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) and 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-16QAM).    

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FSAN unveils roadmap plans

Part 2: Next-generation passive optical networks

The Full Service Access Network (FSAN) has outlined its vision for fibre access networks for the coming decade. 

FSAN is an industry forum that includes over 20 operators and 70 members overall. The group identifies service requirements and develops optical access technologies that are passed to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for standardisation.

Source: FSAN

“One of the messages of the roadmap is that, in the immediate future, what FSAN wants to do is evolve the existing standards,” says Peter Dawes, FSAN NGPON co-chair. 

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ICT could reduce global carbon emissions by 15%

Briefing: Green ICT

Part 1: Standards and best practices

Keith Dickerson is chair of the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) working party on information and communications technology (ICT) and climate change.

In a Q&A with Gazettabyte, he discusses how ICT can help reduce emissions in other industries, where the power hot spots are in the network and what the ITU is doing.

"If you benchmark base stations across different countries and different operators, there is a 5:1 difference in their energy consumption"

Keith Dickerson

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Bringing WDM-PON to market

Significant power, size and cost challenges must be overcome before WDM-PON will be widely deployed.

 "We see just one way to bring down the cost, form-factor and energy consumption of the OLT’s multiple transceivers: high integration of transceiver arrays"

Klaus Grobe, ADVA Optical Networking

Considerable engineering effort will be needed to make next-generation optical access schemes using multiple wavelengths competitive with existing passive optical networks (PONs).

Such a multi-wavelength access scheme, known as a wavelength division multiplexing-passive optical network (WDM-PON), will need to embrace new architectures based on laser arrays and reflective optics, and use advanced photonic integration to meet the required size, power consumption and cost targets.

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Reflecting light to save power

CIP Technologies is bringing its reflective component expertise to an EU-funded project to reduce the power consumption of optical systems.  

System vendors will be held increasingly responsible for the power consumption of their telecom and datacom platforms. That’s because for each watt the equipment generates, up to six watts is required for cooling. It is a burden that will only get heavier given the relentless growth in network traffic.

"Enterprises are looking for huge capacity at low cost and are increasingly concerned about the overall impact on power consumption"

David Smith, CIP Technologies

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BroadLight’s GPON ICs: from packets to apps

What is being announced?

BroadLight has announced its Lilac family of customer premise equipment (CPE) chips that support the Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) standard.

The company claims its GPON devices with be the first to be implemented using a 40nm CMOS process. The advanced CMOS process coupled with architectural enhancements will double processing performance while improving five-fold the packet-processing capability.  The devices also come with a hardware abstraction layer that will help system vendors tailor their equipment.

"Traffic models and service models are not stable, and there are a lot of differences from carrier to carrier"

Didi Ivancovsky, BroadLight

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Next-Gen PON: An interview with BT

An interview with Peter Bell, Access Platform Director, BT Innovate & Design on next generation passive optical networks (PONs). These include 10 Gigabit Ethernet PON (EPON) and Gigabit PON (GPON) and wavelength division multiplexing PON (WDM-PON).

Peter Bell, Access Platform Director, BT Innovate & Design

Q: The status of 10 Gigabit PON – 10G EPON and 10G GPON (XG-PON): Applications, where it will be likely be used, and why is it needed?

PB: IEEE 10G EPON: BT not directly involved but we have been tracking it and believe the standard is close to completion  (gazettabyte: The standard was ratified in September 2009.)

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