Autumn 2019 - Optical Connections Magazine

ELLEN MANNING FIBRE OPTIC CABLES

MORE FIBRES IN SMALLER CABLES E very minute, across the world, more than 3.5 billion Google searches are carried out. There are also 100 million messages sent via SMS and in-app FIBRE IN THE DATACENTRE innovation in the fibre optic cable industry. Ellen Manning reports. Datacentres, both hyper- and micro- scale, are driving developments and

messages, 474,000 tweets tweeted and nearly 70,000 Instagram posts posted. YouTube users reportedly also upload more than 300 hours of video every minute. The sheer volume of data being carried around the world is staggering and continues to grow. Mordor Intelligence’s report ‘Fiber Optic Cable Market - Growth, Trends and Forecast’, recognises that the “explosion of information traffic owing to the internet, electronic commerce, computer

ongoing to ensure the gargantuan amount of data moves as efficiently as possible. For Corning, the growth in data and shift in datacentre design to accommodate it continues to challenge the way networks are deployed, including the optical fibre that connects them and new systems to tackle those challenges, says Sebastian Schreiber, market development manager, Carrier Networks,

vendors. “The transmission of data inside and between datacentres has grown significantly, with 80% of the world’s data created in the last two years, and the infrastructure needs to keep up with that. One way is to increase speed, and the other obvious way is to increase the number of fibres.” SPAGHETTI SITUATION Datacentre development doesn’t just demand changes to fibre, but to components too. SENKO Advanced Components has to make sure connectors are fit-for-purpose for the datacentres of the future. “Today’s datacentres’ biggest problem, and has been for a while, is the cost of the power,” says Miguel Miyamoto, SENKO’s European general manager. As well as saving on this cost, the industry is looking to simplify connectivity within datacentres, which has become what he calls a “spaghetti situation.” It’s an ongoing issue, but a tipping point seems to have been reached where it is no longer a case of simply squeezing

networks, multimedia, voice, data, and video, the need for a transmission medium with the bandwidth capabilities for handling such vast amounts of information is paramount”. That exponential growth forces architecture changes, including to datacentres. Whether through the development of hyperscale datacentres used by internet giants like Google and Facebook or ‘containerised’ versions to cater for the advent of 5G and Edge Computing, changes are

EMEA. Corning started in the early 2000’s with pre-terminated Plug and Play systems but saw densities increase towards the end of the decade prompting a newer, denser infrastructure with the EDGE™ solution. In 2015 it launched eight- fibre based systems, designed around the transceiver roadmaps of the active electronics

Sebastian Schreiber, market development manager, Carrier Networks, EMEA

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ISSUE 18 | Q3 2019

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