BRIAN LAVALLÉE SUB-SEA NETWORKS
ON SEA Terrestrial Optical Tech goes under the sea LAND AND
Submarine and terrestrial networks were once very separate parts of the communications industry with their own unique technologies. However, demand for ever-increasing capacity on the terrestrial side and the growth of international datacentres has led to the convergence of these two domains in terms of the solutions being applied. Peter Dykes spoke with Brian Lavallée , senior director of Portfolio Marketing with global responsibility for Ciena’s 5G, packet and submarine networking solutions, about the ways in which terrestrial optical network technologies are also being utilised in the sub-sea networks.
networking, which is a completely different way of sending information down fibre. That was designed initially for cross-country terrestrial networks from New York to Los Angeles. Then it found its way into the submarine space, and that’s the technology that’s been used for the last ten years. We’re getting up to multiple hundreds of Gbps per channel, whereas in the past it was just ten. We’re talking orders of magnitude increase. That was the first technology, but other technologies include ROADM’s, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data are starting to find their way into submarine networks as well. Ciena has products in most of those areas and again, most of them have been developed for terrestrial networks. Some of them come out of
apply, they cannot carry anything like the capacity needed. So, the industry is starting to look at building increasing diversity, more submarine cables and more protection bandwidth, because when these cables go down, we’re not losing 100 Gbits any more, we’re losing upwards of 100 Tbits.
What are the major issues driving the development of submarine cable technologies?
PD
Getting increased capacity is the main driver. It’s currently running at between 40% and 45% CAGR in all regions. Most of that is being turned up by the content providers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, who are getting into the market right now. They’re all about capacity for datacentre interconnect, but if you look at it holistically as an industry in general, we’ve been turning up incredible amounts of capacity over the last 10 years and people are starting to wonder how far we can go. There’s no Plan B however, it’s submarine networks or nothing. Satellite networks need not BL
Are technologies developed for terrestrial optical networks being applied to subsea networks? They are in a variety of areas. ten years ago, each channel of a submarine cable was 10Gbps maximum and we transmitted
PD
BL
the information by shuttering the light on and off for ones and zeros. Also ten years ago, we invented coherent
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| ISSUE 16 | Q1 2019
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