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The Year in 12 Stories
September 2012
Calix buys FTTH product line from Ericsson
O ptical access vendor Calix has signed two agreements with Ericsson that will boost its position in the FTTH market. The US company has agreed to purchase the fiber access assets from the Swedish firm; a global reseller agreement was also signed under which Calix will become Ericsson’s preferred global partner for broadband access applications. The two companies did not Z TE claims to have set a new world record for 400G high- speed optical transmission based on single-carrier DWDM. The Chinese vendor presented a paper about its work at ECOC in Amsterdam. In the experiment, ZTE successfully transmitted 40 channels, each carrying 400Gbps, over 2800km of standard singlemode fibre arranged in 35 spans, with 80 km per span. The previous distance record for single-carrier 400G transmission was 1200km, and relied on non- standard types of optical fibre as I n recent months Cisco Systems has been talking about its upcoming proprietary 100G optical module, dubbed CPAK. The development is expected to reduce the market opportunity for the CFP2 multi-source agreement (MSA) and has caused disquiet in the industry. “The CFP2 has been a bit slow – the MSA has taken longer than people expected – so Cisco announcing CPAK has frightened a few people,” said Paul Brooks, director for JDSU’s high speed transport test portfolio. The CPAK module, smaller than the CFP2 MSA and three November 2012 October 2012
disclose financial details. Calix has been exploring acquisition deals for a while. “We’ve been looking for a partner for some time and in order for us to growth internationally, in order for us to growth particularly at the Tier One accounts,” Michael Ashby, Calix’s chief financial officer, told the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference on 11 September. The US vendor did look at the
Nokia Siemens Networks deal and decided that it wasn’t the right partnership, he added. That business was sold to Adtran. For Ericsson, the deal allows the company to focus on core products without abandoning its existing portfolio or customers. “We believe that this partnership will provide our existing fiber access customers with world- class support and maintenance, and an expanded portfolio of
access systems and software from a leading company totally focused on access,” said Jan Häglund, vice president and head of product area IP and broadband at Ericsson. Calix expects the deal to close in October, after which it would add to its adjusted earnings. Calix also expects to see its headcount increase as it takes on 61 employees from Ericsson’s fibre access division.
ZTE boasts new 400G transmission record
well as Raman amplification. Optical vendors and carriers are investigating 400Gbps as a way to increase channel rate and overall system capacity. Single-carrier transmission has advantages over multi-carrier schemes because it has simple transmitting and receiving structures and is easier to manage, according to the Chinese vendor. ZTE also points out that the modulation scheme that it used – polarization-division multiplexing quadrature phase-shift keying (PDM-QPSK) – is a well-developed scheme that benefits from acute quarters its volume, has not been officially released and Cisco will not comment on the design, but the CPAK has been detailed in the company’s presentations. The CPAK is the first example of Cisco’s module design capability following its acquisition of silicon photonics player Lightwire. In addition, Cisco previously acquired CoreOptics, a developer of digital signal processing for high-speed optical transponders in 2010. The development of the module highlights how the acquisition of core technology can give an equipment maker the ability to
receiver sensitivity, which makes it possible to employ standard singlemode fibres and ordinary erbium-doped fibre amplifiers to achieve ultra-long-distance system transmission. That means no need for major modifications to the installed fibre base. “The experiment demonstrates the feasibility of deploying wavelengths beyond 100G over the current fibre transmission system,” said ZTE in its press release. The single-carrier system reaches 108 Gbaud, which the company claims is the highest develop proprietary interfaces that promise costs savings and differentiation. The development also raises a question mark regarding the CFP2 and the merit of MSAs when a potential leading customer of the CFP2 chooses to use its own design. But industry analysts do not believe it undermines the CFP2 MSA market. “I believe there is business for the CFP2,” said Daryl Inniss, practice leader, Ovum Components. “Cisco is shooting for a solution that has some staying power. The CFP2 is too large and the power consumption
symbol rate in the industry. It will be a number of years before the electronics needed to generate such high-speed signals becomes generally available, however, so the researchers used optical time- division multiplexing (OTDM) to generate the data signal. ZTE is clearly aiming to associate its name with high-speed transmission. The Chinese vendor says it had a prototype 1Tbps DWDM as early as July 2011, and that during 2012 it has released seven versions of 400G/1T DWDM prototype equipment targeting a variety of network applications too high while the CFP4 is too small and will take too long to get to market; CPAK is a great compromise.” Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of market research firm, LightCounting, is not surprised by the development. “Cisco could use more proprietary parts and technologies to compete with Huawei over the next decade,” he said. “From a transceiver vendor perspective, custom- made products are often more profitable than standard ones; unless Cisco will make everything in house, which is unlikely, it is not bad news.”
Cisco’s CPAK set to challenge the CFP2
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