BRIEFING GO!FOTON
Hello David. Let’s begin with a general question: what’s the elevator version of your mission at Go!Foton? Go!Foton is an industry leading optics and telecommunications technology company. We supply passive and active optical
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components, and we build connectivity and network intelligence solutions using our own components that help carriers and data centres meet the challenges presented by today’s rapid pace of fibre densification.
Could you briefly explain the key factors responsible for densification? Why is it happening now? The demands being placed on our networks just to sustain current traffic are already challenging; for next-gen applications the pressures
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will be unprecedented. Over the coming decade, standards for key performance indicators like bandwidth, availability, and latency will need to be dramatically upgraded. While today’s networks can reliably handle applications like video streaming, they are nowhere near ready for so-called “presence” apps like tele-surgery and virtual reality. These will depend critically not only on multi-gigabit symmetrical data rates but even more importantly on order-of-magnitude reductions in request- response times. Average 4G latencies in the US are currently around 50ms, but the networks of the future will be expected consistently to deliver <5ms round trips. Fibre will play an essential role in building networks that can offer such performance.
FIBRE DENSIFICATION: GO!FOTON RISES TO THE CHALLENGE
Why fibre? Won’t many of the killer apps of the future be wireless?
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There are a number of factors driving fibre densification globally, not the least of which is 5G, and it is something which will only increase over time. The increased demand being created for front haul and datacentre expansion is creating the need for greater innovation in areas such as physical connectivity. David Chen, CTO at Go!Foton discusses the issue and looks at how the company is meeting the challenge.
Yes, and that’s exactly the point. Wireless networks are probably a more powerful driver of densification than even wireline
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networks! That sounds paradoxical, but it’s easily explainable. The promise of wireless technology is to untether end users physically from the network while according them access to the services and data that run on the network. But the magical connection that lets you carry the world in your pocket serves only the last hop. Your phone is wireless, but the cell from which it receives and to which it transmits is not—it’s connected to the wireline network, through a process called backhaul, mostly by hard media like fibre and copper. And the implementation of 5G - especially its up- spectrum varieties, the so-called mm-wave
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| ISSUE 20 | Q1 2020
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