XXXX XXXX BRIAN LAVALLÉE SUB-SEA NETWORKS
How will Ciena develop its product set going forward?
be connected with submarine cables to datacentres on the other side of the ocean.
the datacentre space and were being applied to terrestrial networks but are increasingly being applied to submarine networks. In the past, the technology players in the submarine industry were very separate from terrestrial. They were very demarcated. When we came out with coherent networking, we used the exact same technology on land and over sea, so suddenly the networks and technologies, rather than being one on dry land and one under water, are essentially becoming the same. The only real difference is the packaging of the submarine cable.
PD
We’re approaching the Shannon Limit, so we’re actually approaching diminishing returns, because we went from 10G to
Are those cables used exclusively for datacentres or do they carry other traffic as well? Typically, if you have a submarine cable, you’ll have a set of fibre pairs so you’ll have a consortium of which the Internet Presence
BL
PD
40G to 100G and we’re not going to go from 100G to 1Tbps per channel, so the industry is beginning to look at new technologies where you can put more fibre pairs in a submarine cable. We will keep innovating on that side and there’s also the intelligent mesh protection innovation, there’s software development, big data analytics, which is just starting to find its way into the submarine and the terrestrial space, and that will continue going forward. Indeed, we are investing a lot of money in those area.
BL
Providers (IPPs) will be members, so they’ll have their own fibre pairs. Then for example Microsoft and Facebook will have a fibre pair each and a network operator would have the third fibre pair so they all typically share connectivity across the cable.
What protection does submarine cable require to protect it from damage? There are a variety of people and groups protecting cables such as the International Cable Protection Committee
PD
How is 5G going to impact on the submarine cable industry?
BL
PD
How would you characterise the importance of fibre going forward? With all the hype around 5G, and there is a lot, the wireless part of the journey is between your smartphone and the radio which
PD
It will impact on the submarine industry indirectly, but it will impact. Most of the content being served up by Google, Facebook,
for example. They look at procedures around how to install, deploy, manage and maintain cables. There are also governments which regulate where cables can and cannot drop their anchors. On the vendors’ side, our perspective is that we assume things will happen. Anchors will be dragged away, there will be sub-sea earthquakes and hurricanes, so we build mesh-protected intelligent networks where it is possible to automatically reroute around cable faults. But these things do occur and up to three quarters of them are man-made, such as fishing and anchoring, but they will maybe cut one or two cables at a time so that’s not too bad, but when there is an undersea earthquake, tsunami or a hurricane, upwards of ten or more cables can be cut at the same time. Typically, a network operator would have capacity multiple cables to develop an intelligent mesh network. Most of the submarine services sold today are unprotected, but if you buy unprotected links over a geographically dispersed cables, you can put intelligence on the endpoint and build your own mesh protection.
BL
BL
Microsoft and even Amazon is related to video, social media, consumer and business applications. Those all reside in datacentres. So how do consumers get access to that content and those applications? Increasingly, it’s through smartphones. 5G is supposed to give anywhere from 10 to 100 times faster speeds than we have today with 4G, and that traffic is coming out of a datacentre. So, if you’re going to download more traffic, faster, and we’re talking from 4K to 8K video in a few years, the access to content which is user-to-datacentre will increase and the datacentre-to- datacentre will increase because they typically share the content being accessed between the datacentres themselves. The belief in the industry is that it will have an effect and we’re essentially talking more capacity, but the exact effect is hard to quantify right now.
is sitting on a tower or on the side of a building. Once it hits that radio, it’s fibre all the way back to the datacentre which is where you’re actually getting the data that’s being hosted. So, if we’re going to increase the access speed per user and add ten or a hundred times more users, the amount that’s going to be pulled from the edge is going to be enormous, and the only way to cost-effectively cope with those bandwidth demands is fibre. If you look at some of the larger carriers, and Verizon is a good example, they went out and bought a billion dollars worth of Corning fibre and a lot of that has to do with their fibre plant expansion for 4G, 5G, mobile services and all the other stuff that they’re doing. Fibre optics is a very big play.
Which geographic areas are showing the most demand for sub-sea optical technologies? Ciena leads in terms of submarine upgrades. We make the equipment that hangs off the ends of the cable, which is where
PD
BL
the upgrades happen. We have several wins across the Atlantic, the Pacific, the intra-Pacific, all the way down to the Caribbean and Latin America, so we participate in all regions of the world. In APAC, it’s related to the population growth and the economies, but also the content providers I mentioned earlier. They’re starting to build massive datacentres in APAC and those have to
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ISSUE 16 | Q1 2019
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