CIENA Q&A HELEN XENOS
CIENA: PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Ciena has had considerable success with its optical transmission products in recent years, but customer demands for higher data throughput over much longer distances, combined with the drive for greater sustainability, means that even a market leader cannot afford to sit on its laurels. Optical Connections editor Peter Dykes spoke with Helen Xenos Ciena’s senior director of Portfolio Marketing, about the company’s plans to meet the challenges of the coming new year and beyond.
Coherent is now a firmly established technology, but where does it go from here?
that to happen. You always need to look at what’s next from a technology development perspective. From a Ciena perspective, the development of next generation coherent solutions is well underway and the design targets for these are bold. If we can get to 400 Gig anywhere with WaveLogic 5 Extreme, then what’s next? We need something that gives a sizable jump forward in network economic improvements, so now it would be 800 Gig across any distance. I predict for 2023 that you will see a lot of announcements in that area. Stay tuned!
other is really focusing on meeting certain, aggressive sustainability targets which is more important than ever, for all of us. Indeed, we’re seeing this becoming more prevalent in our discussions with customers as we move forward.
PD
HX When we talk about coherent technology, innovation is happening across multiple fronts. With our performance optimised 800 Gig technology, we have the highest bandwidth traffic flows, the most capacity, that you can support on a fibre, the best spectral efficiency, but also with the pluggables, it allows scaling of networks well into the access, and allows for significant new levels of power reduction and sustainability. In 2007, we introduced the industry’s first 400 Gig transceiver and five years later, we introduced a 400 Gig pluggable with the same capacity at one-fifth of the power and one-tenth of the space, so it’s really remarkable the pace of innovation we are seeing with coherent technology. So, what’s next in 2023? Of course, bandwidth demands will continue to grow as many more smart devices are connected to the network. Studies suggest anywhere from 10 billion to 40 billion right now in the world, and we are looking forward to more bandwidth demands in the work and home environments and also thinking about the metaverse and how we enable
As a manufacturer, how can Ciena make its products more sustainable and reduce its
PD
carbon footprint?
As far as sustainability is concerned, it’s a huge area of focus for all the customers that
HX
So do you plan to develop WaveLogic further?
we talk to today. And we’ve also calculated what has been the impact of our coherent technology innovations in the area and how has it helped our customers reduce greenhouse gases. We’ve calculated the impact of the power and space efficiencies that have been achieved with each successive WaveLogic generation that we’ve introduced over the past 10 years. It has led to a reduction of 4.5 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, and this includes the impact of 18 months of WaveLogic 5 Extreme shipments as well, which is pretty significant. From a coherent technology perspective, the reason why everyone is so focused on
PD
HX We have two parallel development plans for WaveLogic coherent technology. We have performance optimised coherent optics with WaveLogic 5 Extreme, but then at the same time, we are investing in our footprint optimised, coherent pluggable family with WaveLogic 5 Nano, which plays into multiple different evolving trends that we’re seeing in the market. One of them is the evolution to converged IP optical architectures that more and more service providers are looking at. The
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