ELLEN MANNING 400G DEPLOYMENT
becoming a necessity – not just a luxury 400G deployment
Designing and Testing 400G systems
As telecoms providers and data centre operators battle to keep up with the insatiable demand for high data rates, the need for deployable 400G networks appears ever-more imminent, writes Ellen Manning.
is look at what we can do from the electronics side and then what we can do from the optical side and then we can marry those capabilities together. “We are in very early days of 400G. If you look at 100G, systems and networks at that rate have only really just started to be deployed around the world in volume during the past few years. “It’s getting more challenging with the physics in converting the electrons into the photons. Companies that have core capability in how to manipulate, amplify and move the light around are the guys who are going to be successful. “I think it’s going to lead to some interesting shifts in the industry as we go to the higher bandwidths and their subcomponents.” ‘NICHE OPPORTUNITIES’ Sven Krueger, VP product management at Cube Optics, part of Swiss-based
ELLEN MANNING
B ig name telecoms systems, while last September’s ECOC expo included demonstrations from Oclaro of its developments in fibre optic transceivers and components for data centre interconnect, metro, and long-haul networks at the new higher rate. So 400G is undoubtedly coming – but who will use it, what are the hurdles, and what does it mean for the industry as a whole? companies like Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent (now part of Nokia) are already testing 400G For Adam Carter, Chief Commercial Officer at Oclaro, the biggest need for 400G is in the transport and metro or regional networks with demands coming from mobile networks, connected devices and data centres. “Just think about what sort of things you use your cell phone for and any other mobile device today. If you think that by 2020 there will be 50 billion active devices worldwide connected through the Internet, the bandwidth requirement to enable that to happen is pretty high.” DATA CENTRES The other driver is data centres, he added, including an increased reliance
on the Cloud as well as traffic-hungry networks demanding ever-increasing capacity. These developments are moving fast, according to Carter, with demands showing no sign of being limited to 100G or 200G – or even 400G, for that matter. Oclaro is currently in the sampling phase with various systems houses for its first short-reach 400G interfaces, intended to be implemented in large, high-capacity routers. But developing products that can cater for higher capacities and are pushing the boundaries of physics comes with its challenges, Carter said. “What we have to do as an industry
BT Openreach engineers laying fibre in a duct as part of BT’s multi-billion pound super-fast broadband programme.
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| ISSUE 8 | Q1 2017
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