JOHN WILLIAMSON 800G
800G-WHIZ: OPTICAL INDUSTRY UPS THE DATA RATE ANTE
booming demand for additional, lower cost bandwidth to support ultra-fast Internet access, more and higher quality video content, higher-speed datacentre interconnect; and new services and applications such as gaming, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 5G. This ‘capacity rapacity’ is also evident inside datacentres, with a widely cited Cisco estimate that, by 2021, nearly 15 Zettabytes of traffic will be transiting datacentres, rack-to-rack, without leaving those centres. “What’s driving the need? It’s basically very simple,” says Helen Xenos, senior director, portfolio marketing at networking equipment, software, and services company Ciena. “It’s all about keeping up with all this end user bandwidth demand that we’re seeing, while at the same time decreasing the network cost.” Reduced cost is a compelling and well- established piece of the higher optical capacity deal. “Lower cost per bit – this is always the driver for higher data rate per wavelength,” observes Geoff Bennett, director of solutions and technology at optical and IP networking company Infinera. “Creating 800G with multiple transponders is more expensive than using a single 800G transponder.” Ciena also views the embracing of 800G as a strategy that provides operators and service providers with an elegant evolution to the networked use of
A flurry of 800G-related optical networking activity is presently kicking off in different locations across the world. Veteran journalist John Williamson looks at the latest developments.
A partial account of this phenomenon for the first three months of this year takes in: subsea operator Southern Cross using Ciena technology to connect what was billed as the first single wavelength 800G solution across a live production network; Huawei’s launch of what it said was industry’s first 800G tunable optical module; the announcement that Verizon, in partnership with Ciena and Juniper Networks, had completed a live network test that moved 800 Gbps of data on a single wavelength; news that China Mobile and Huawei had completed a live demonstration of an 800G optical transport network; the successful trial by Infinera and Corning of an 800G single wavelength system across 800 km; Turkcell’s achievement of an 800G WDM trial with Huawei on a live mobile carrier network; and Infinera’s report that it had conducted a live network trial of 800G single wavelength transmission
at 96 Gbaud over 950 km in a major North American network operator’s production network. Winston Way, VP and CTO at photonic integrated optoelectronic device specialist NeoPhotonics, remarks that in 2020, Ciena, Infinera, and Huawei have announced their 800G line-card products for multi-rate and multi-haul applications. “These products can find applications in long-haul 400G and high spectral efficiency short-haul 800G systems,” he explains. “On the other hand, some hyperscale datacentres have publicly talked about their future need, in two to three years, of pluggable 800G transceivers for datacentre interconnections.” 800G DRIVERS So, what is prompting these and similar efforts to get 800G further along the road to commercialisation? The on-going escalation of present and foreseeable capacity requirements is an obvious driver. In WAN and MAN optical networks there’s
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| ISSUE 21 | Q3 2020
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