Infinera's XR optics pluggable plans
Sunday, August 8, 2021 at 9:04AM Infinera’s coherent pluggables for XR optics will also address the company’s metro needs.
Coherent pluggables now dominate the metro market where embedded designs account for just a fifth of all ports, says Infinera.
Robert Shore
“As we grow our metro business, we need our own pluggables if we want to be cost-competitive,” says Robert Shore, senior vice president of marketing at Infinera.
Infinera’s family of pluggables implementing the XR optics concept is dubbed ICE-XR.
XR optics splits a coherent optical signal into Nyquist sub-carriers, each carrying a data payload. Twenty-five gigabits will likely be the sub-carrier capacity chosen.
XR optics can be used for point-to-point links where all the sub-carriers go to the same destination. But the sub-carriers can also be steered to different destinations, similar to how breakout cables are used in the data centre.
With XR optics, a module can talk to several lower-speed ones in a point-to-multipoint arrangement. This enables optical feeds to be summed, ideal for traffic aggregation applications such as access and 5G.
