ECOC 2025: industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending ECOC 2025 in Copenhagen. Here are the first contributions from LightWave Logic's Yves LeMaitre, Maxim Kuschnerov of Huawei, and LightCounting's Daryl Inniss.

The Little Mermaid, Copenhagen

Yves LeMaitre, CEO of LightWave Logic

The optical centre of gravity has shifted towards AI networking; everything else is becoming an afterthought. Even data centre interconnect/ ZR coherent optics, a major topic at OFC2025, is relegated to a secondary topic.

The achievement of 400G/lane is happening faster than everyone thought. The race to chiplets, co-packaged optics, integration and the co-packaging of Electronic and photonic ICs (EICs/PICs) is what will define the winners of tomorrow. Winning in the transceiver world might feed you today, but you'd better adjust quickly to the new AI world order.

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OFC 2025: industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary OFC show in San Francisco. Here are the first contributions from Huawei’s Maxim Kuschnerov, NLM Photonics' Brad Booth, LightCounting’s Vladimir Kozlov, and Jürgen Hatheier, Chief Technology Officer, International, at Ciena.

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Maxim Kuschnerov, Director of R&D, Huawei

The excitement of last year's Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing unit (GPU) announcement has worn off, and there was a slight hangover at OFC from the market frenzy then.

The 224 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) opto-electronic signalling is reaching mainstream in the data centre. The last remaining question is how far VCSELs will go—30 m or perhaps even further. The clear focus of classical Ethernet data centre optics for scale-out architectures is on the step to 448Gbps-per-lane signalling, and it was great to see many feasibility demonstrations of optical signalling showing that PAM-4 and PAM-6 modulation schemes will be doable.

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Books of 2024: Part 1

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their notable reads during the year. Harald Bock, Jonathan Homa, and Maxim Kuschenrov kick off with their chosen books.

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Harald Bock, Vice President Network Architecture, Infinera

I love reading but have not read as many books as I would have liked in recent years. I decided to change that in 2024.

My pick of fictional books this year was mainly classic science fiction after seeing the movie Dune Part 2 with my family. I read the book Dune by Frank Herbert, published in 1965, a while ago, and I wasn't sure that the movies did the book justice.

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are the first contributions from Huawei's Maxim Kuschnerov, Coherent's Vipul Bhatt, and Broadcom's Rajiv Pancholy.

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Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

At ECOC, my main interest concerned the evolution of data centre networking to 400 gigabits per lane for optics and electronics. Historically, the adoption of new optical line rates always preceded the serdes electrical interconnects but now copper cables are likely to drive much of the leading development work at 400 gigabit per lane.

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Nokia picks Infinera to boost its optical networking arm

Nokia has announced its intention to buy optical networking specialist Infinera for $2.3 billion. 

The motivation for the Infinera acquisition is scale, said Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark, during an analyst call detailing the announcement. 

Jimmy Yu, Dell'Oro Group

Optical networking is how communications service providers and hyperscalers cope with the exponential traffic growth. 

Continual innovation is required to reduce the cost and power consumed to transport such traffic. For a systems vendor, having scale helps meet these aims.

Optical networking wasn't always central to Nokia's strategy. In 2013, Nokia sold its optical networking arm to Marlin Equity Partners, which became Coriant.

Now, Nokia wants to be a leading optical networking vendor by acquiring Infinera, a company that bought Coriant in 2018.   

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OFC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent OFC show in San Diego. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from Huawei, Drut Technologies and Aloe Semiconductor.

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

Some ten years ago datacom took the helm of the optical transceiver market from legacy telecom operators to command a much larger volume of short-reach optics and extend its vision into dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM).

At OFC, the industry witnessed another passing-of-the-torch moment as Nvidia took over the dominant position in the optics market where AI compute is driving optical communication. The old guard of Google is now following while others are closely watching.

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The OIF's coherent optics work gets a ZR+ rating

The OIF has started work on a 1600ZR+ standard to enable the sending of 1.6 terabits of data across hundreds of kilometres of optical fibre. 

The initiative follows the OIF's announcement last September that it had kicked off 1600ZR. ZR refers to an extended reach standard, sending 1.6 terabits over an 80-120km point-to-point link. 

1600ZR follows the OIF's previous work standardising the 400-gigabit 400ZR and the 800-gigabit 800ZR coherent pluggable optics.      

The decision to address a 'ZR+' standard is a first for the OIF. Until now, only the OpenZR+ Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) and the OpenROADM MSA developed interoperable ZR+ optics.

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