Spring 2019 Optical Connections Magazine

MATTHEW PEACH LONG-HAUL

GOING THE DISTANCE LONG HAUL TECHNOLOGIES EVOLVE TO MEET GROWING NEEDS

L ong haul and ultra-long-haul optical communications require data transmission over large distances through fibre optic cables. So-called “long- haul” optical fibre cables used for data transmission across cities, countries, or even continents typically stretch up to 3000km (anything longer is “ultra”). But in one notable extreme case, in May 2018, Vodafone India announced the launch of the world’s largest 200G optical fibre ultra-long-haul project spanning across 88 cities and covering a distance of 43,000km. “Long-haul terrestrial networks are used for undersea cabling to cross large oceanic distances. Repeaters are used for cabling as there is a possibility of signal weakening while the data is being transmitted over these large distances,” stated market analyst company Technavio in its latest long-haul sector report in December 2018. The data communication segment holds the largest optical amplifier market share, accounting for around 44% of the market. This end-user segment is expected to dominate the global market over the coming five years. Geographically, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region leads the market with 58% of the value, followed by the Americas and EMEA respectively, said Technavio. Pranay Aiya, VP product marketing & applications engineering at Inphi Solutions, told Optical Connections, “Our systems enable the movement of big data fast and around the globe, with high reliability. We offer semiconductor components and optical subsystems to our customer base of networking OEMs,

As the boundaries between ultra and long-haul networks blur and the reach of data centre and metro nets increase there is a collective effort to boost performance, reduce errors and cut power demands, writes Matthew Peach .

to 100GBps, 128QAM and potentially 256QAM. “A notable trend in the long-haul market supporting processor technologies is that analogue-digital and digital-analogue conversion is moving to higher baud rates and bits, to allow the received coherent analogue signal to be processed digitally, and the raw digital signal to be properly processed for coherent analogue transmission,” he said. Considering the long-haul market, Aiya said, “A bigger percentage, probably about 80-90% of the long-haul market is in this window between 1000km to 3000km distance. More and more solutions that address the smaller reaches are now becoming compact enough to accommodate the performance necessary to enable long-haul transmission.” But he acknowledged that overall long- haul is still just a small part of the overall fibre optic communications market: “Traditionally, links up to 3000km were the bread and butter of the coherent market. Now I would say that long-haul is about 30% of the whole market, the rest being mainly metro although we

optical module, cloud and telecom service providers.” “As far as long haul is concerned, Inphi’s focus is primarily on the coherent Digital Signal Processor (DSP). This is the device that was added to our portfolio as a result of the Clarify acquisition in 2016. Our aim for the coherent DSP over recent iterations has been on more integration, HIGHER LONG-HAUL RATES NeoPhotonics is involved in the development and manufacture of a range of optoelectronic products for data communication and telecommunication segments – including long-haul applications. Its optical transceiver product portfolio includes CFP, CFP2, QSFP, QSFP28, SFP, and SFP+ configurations. Coherent DSPs used to operate at 32GBps, DP-QPSK for 100G transmission but these rates are going up: the current state of the art is 64GBps, 64QAM and the trend in the next 3-5 years, according to Marc Stiller, vice president, business development at NeoPhotonics, is that this will move lower power and achieving smaller footprint modules or transceivers.”

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| ISSUE 16 | Q1 2019

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