ANTONY SAVVAS COHERENT PLUGGABLES
The pluggable coherent module market is a growing one in response to different connectivity demands. Antony Savvas takes a look at industry developments and why they are happening. A FAST DEVELOPING MARKET COHERENT PLUGGABLES:
I ndustry research firm Cignal AI recently updated its numbers for coherent port shipments. It says that shipments of 400ZR/ ZR+ modules “surged” in the last quarter of 2021, as Cisco unit Acacia and Marvell rapidly scaled production capacity. However, it finds that demand from cloud operators is still exceeding supply, which is set to be increased this year as vendors such as Ciena, Neophotonics and II-VI grow production. Cignal AI expects that shipments of 400ZR/ZR+ modules “will triple” in 2022 as cloud operators such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google are joined by traditional network operators, “such as AT&T, Windstream and COLT”, in rolling out high volume deployments. “Both web scale and telco operators are making fundamental changes to their network architectures due to the availability of pluggable 400G coherent modules,” says Scott Wilkinson, lead optical component analyst at Cignal AI. “Module shipments are ramping up quickly.” TWO FAMILIES Helen Xenos, senior director at Ciena, says there are two distinct families of leading coherent technologies available today, performance-optimised 800Gb/s embedded solutions and
Outposts services, and Google and Microsoft have strategies and products that are very similar. In this context, edge computing poses a few problems for telecom providers, as they must manage hundreds or thousands of new nodes that will be hard to control and maintain.” But Effect Photonics confirms that “cost-effective and fit-for-purpose” coherent solutions for edge connectivity are now widely available to help. Tracey Vanik, head of photonics research at EPIC (the European Photonics Industry Consortium), says of the needs of the edge, “400ZR coherent transceivers are expanding into additional applications beyond 400Gbs. Core and data centres will require even higher speeds of 800Gbps and above. And as the core grows, tributaries will be able to increase their capacity. Aggregates of 10Gbps at the edge are no longer adequate and use too many systems. II-VI and ADVA, for instance, recognised this and recently announced a coherent 100Gbs transceiver for the optical edge.” She adds, “Operating at only 5 Watts, Adva’s new 100ZR transceiver for metro and edge networks is poised to offer a higher bandwidth option to traditional 10G Ethernet connections for metro, edge and larger enterprise networks. Additionally, these 100Gbps coherent
footprint-optimised 400Gb/s coherent pluggables. “Depending on their network architecture, we expect operators to gravitate to whichever coherent technology provides lowest total cost of ownership. This often means the use of different types of coherent technology in different parts of their network. Offered in industry-standard form factors, coherent pluggables deliver dramatic space and power efficiency improvements, and open the door to new converged IP/optical architectures. “The pace of innovation with coherent technology is remarkable,” says Xenos. “Today, one of our pluggables supports the same capacity, but offers better performance using only a fifth of the power and a tenth of the space, when compared to products five years ago.” EDGE Effect Photonics points out that smaller data centres deployed locally at the edge have the potential to minimise latency, overcome inconsistent connections, and store and compute data closer to the end-user. It says these drivers are leading hyperscalers to cooperate with telecom operators to install their servers in the existing carrier infrastructure. “For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is implementing its edge technology in carrier networks and company premises, such as its AWS Wavelength and AWS
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| ISSUE 30 | Q3 2022
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