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Entries in BT (29)

Sunday
Dec022012

NeoPhotonics' PIC transceiver tackles PON business case

Gazettabyte completes its summary of optical announcements at ECOC, held in Amsterdam. In the third and final part, NeoPhotonics GPON multiport transceiver is detailed.

Part 3: NeoPhotonics


“Anything that can be done to get high utilisation of your equipment, which represents your up-front investment, helps the business case"

 

Chris Pfistner, NeoPhotonics  

 

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Friday
Jan272012

Huawei boosts its optical roadmap with CIP acquisition 

Huawei has acquired UK photonic integration specialist, CIP Technologies, from the East of England Development Agency (EEDA) for an undisclosed fee. The acquisition gives the Chinese system vendor a wealth of optical component expertise and access to advanced European Union R&D projects.

"By acquiring CIP and integrating the company’s R&D team into Huawei’s own research team, Huawei’s optic R&D capabilities can be significantly enhanced," says Peter Wharton, CEO at the Centre for Integrated Photonics (CIP). CIP Technologies is the trading name of the Centre for Integrated Photonics. 

 

 Huawei now has six European R&D centres with the acquisition of CIP.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday
Oct252011

100 Gigabit: An operator view

Gazettabyte spoke with BT, Level 3 Communications and Verizon about their 100 Gigabit optical transmission plans and the challenges they see regarding the technology.

 

Briefing: 100 Gigabit

Part 1: Operators 

Operators will use 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) coherent technology for their next-generation core networks. For metro, operators favour coherent and have differing views regarding the alternative, 100Gbps direct-detection schemes. All the operators agree that the 100Gbps interfaces - line-side and client-side - must become cheaper before 100Gbps technology is more widely deployed.

 

"It is clear that you absolutely need 100 Gig in large parts of the network"

Steve Gringeri, Verizon

 

 

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Monday
May302011

R&D: At home or abroad?

ECI Telecom chose to set up its latest R&D site in Israel. Gazettabyte met with Chaim Urbach, ECI’s head of global R&D operations, to discuss why it decided to locate its latest site in Israel, and how the company can compete with the leading telecom players that have considerably larger R&D teams and budgets.

 

Omer Industrial Park in the Negev, Israel; the location of ECI Telecom's latest R&D centre.

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Wednesday
Mar092011

Operators want to cut power by a fifth by 2020

Briefing: Green ICT

Part 2: Operators’ power efficiency strategies

Service providers have set themselves ambitious targets to reduce their energy consumption by a fifth by 2020. This despite the expected traffic they will carry being thirty times today’s volumes. Given the cost of electricity and operators’ requirements, such targets are not surprising: KPN, with its 12,000 sites in The Netherlands, consumes 1% of the country’s electricity.

 

“We also have to invest in capital expenditure for a big swap of equipment – in mobile and DSLAMs"

Philippe Tuzzolino, France Telecom-Orange

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Friday
May142010

Optical transmission beyond 100Gbps

Briefing: High-speed optical transmission. 

Part 3: What's next?

Given the 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) optical transmission market is only expected to take off from 2013, addressing what comes next seems premature. Yet operators and system vendors have been discussing just this issue for at least six months.

And while it is far too early to talk of industry consensus, all agree that optical transmission is becoming increasingly complex. As Karen Liu, vice president, components and video technologies at market research firm Ovum, observed at OFC 2010, bandwidth on the fibre is no longer plentiful.

 

“We need to keep a very close eye that we are not creating more problems than we are solving.”

Brandon Collings, JDS Uniphase.

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Tuesday
Apr272010

40 and 100Gbps: Growth assured yet uncertainty remains 

Briefing: High-speed optical transmission.

Part 2: 40 and 100Gbps optical transmission

The market for 40 and 100 Gigabit-per-second optical transmission is set to grow over the next five years at a rate unmatched by any other optical networking segment.  Such growth may excite the industry but vendors have tough decisions to make as to how best to pursue the opportunity.

Market research firm Ovum forecasts that the wide area network (WAN) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) market for 40 and 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) linecards will have a 79% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) till 2014.

In turn, 40 and 100Gbps transponder volumes will grow even faster, at 100% CAGR till 2015, while revenues from 40 and 100Gbps transponder sale will have a 65% CAGR during the same period.

Yet with such rude growth comes uncertainty.

 

“We upgraded to 40Gbps because we believe – we are certain, in fact – that across the router and backbone it [40Gbps technology] is cheaper”

Jim King, AT&T Labs.

 

Systems, transponder and component vendors all have to decide what next-generation modulation schemes to pursue for 40Gbps to complement the now established differential phase-shift keying (DPSK). There are also questions regarding the cost of the different modulation options, while vendors must assess what impact 100Gbps will have on the 40Gbps market and when the 100Gbps market will take off.  

“What is clear to us is how muddled the picture is,” says Matt Traverso, senior manager, technical marketing at Opnext.

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