The significance of 6G

Henning Schulzrinne is known for speaking his mind.

A professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, he previously expressed concern regarding what he saw as excessive hype surrounding 5G.

More recently, he has written about 6G, placing the emerging wireless standard in the broader context of societal needs.

"Research, particularly academic research, should be driven by the urgent needs of society, not just supplying patent-protected 'moats' against the competition, whether between companies or nations," he wrote in an introduction to the book, Shaping Future 6G Networks.

Schulzrinne stresses he is not working on 6G standards but has taken part in an early 6G flagship project at the University of Oulu, Finland.

"My expertise is not on the radio; it is system architecture," he says. "We have a lot of interest in my research group on issues such as automation and authentication, not specifically to 6G but to networks."

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A career in technology market analysis

John Lively reflects on a 30-year career.

It was a typical workday in 1989, sitting through a meeting announcing the restructuring of Corning's planar coupler business.

The speaker's final words were, "Lively, you'll be doing forecasting." It changed my life and set my career path for the next 30-plus years.

John Lively, principal analyst at market research firm, LightCounting.

No one grows up with a desire to be a market analyst. Indeed, I didn't ask for the job. What made it possible was an IBM PC and LOTUS 1-2-3 in my marine biology lab in the early 1980s (a story for another time).

After a stop at MIT for an MBA, this led to a job in Corning's fledgling PC support team in 1985. Then it was Corning's optical fibre business cost-modelling fibre-to-the-home networks on a PC, working with Bellcore and General Instrument engineers. From there, it was to forecast market demand for planar couplers in the FTTH market.

In the following decade, I had various market forecasting roles within Corning's optical fibre and photonics businesses.

Each time I tried to put forecasting behind me by taking a marketing or product management job, management said they needed me to return to forecasting due to some crisis or another (thank you, Bernie Ebbers).

In 1999, I had an epiphany. If Corning thinks I'm better at forecasting than anything else, perhaps I should become a professional forecaster in a company whose product is forecasts.

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Broadcom samples the first 51.2-terabit switch chip

• Broadcom's Tomahawk 5 marks the era of the 51.2-terabit switch chip
• The 5nm CMOS device consumes less than 500W
• The Tomahawk 5 uses 512, 100-gigabit PAM-4 (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) serdes (serialisers-deserialisers)
• Broadcom will offer a co-packaged version combining the chip with eight 6.4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) optical engines

Part 1: Broadcom's Tomahawk 5

Broadcom is sampling the world's first 51.2-terabit switch chip.

With the Tomahawk 5, Broadcom continues to double switch silicon capacity every 24 months; Broadcom launched the first 3.2-terabit Tomahawk was launched in September 2014.

"Broadcom is once again first to market at 51.2Tbps," says Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at Wheeler's Network. "It continues to execute, while competitors have struggled to deliver multiple generations in a timely manner."

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ADCs key for high baud-rate coherent systems

Increasing the baud rate of coherent modems benefits optical transport. The higher the baud rate the more data can be sent on a wavelength, reducing the cost-per-bit of traffic.

But engineers have become so good at designing coherent systems that they are now approaching the Shannon limit. 

Tomislav Drenski

At the OFC show earlier this year, Ciena showcased a coherent module operating at 107 gigabaud (GBd). And last year, Acacia, now part of Cisco, announced its next-generation 1.2 terabits-per-second (Tbps) wavelength coherent module operating at up to 140GBd. 

The industry believes that increasing the baud rate to 240+GBd is possible, but each new symbol-rate hike is challenging.

All the components in a modem - the coherent DSP and its digital-to-analogue (DAC) and analogue-to-digital (ADC) converters, the optics, and the analogue drive circuitry - must scale in lockstep.

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Europe's first glimpse of a live US baseball game

It is rare to visit a museum dedicated to telecoms, never mind one set in beautiful grounds. Nor does it often happen that the visit coincides with an important anniversary for the site.

La Cité des Télécoms, a museum set in 11 hectares of land in Pleumeur-Bodou, Brittany, France, is where the first TV live feed was sent by satellite from the US to Europe.

The Radôme protecting the vast horn antenna

The Telstar 1 communications satellite was launched 60 years ago, on July 10, 1962. The first transmission that included part of a live Chicago baseball game almost immediately followed.

By then, a vast horn radio antenna had been constructed and was awaiting the satellite's first signals. The Radôme houses the antenna, an inflated dome-shaped skin to protect it from the weather. The antenna is built using 276 tonnes of steel and sits on 4,000 m³ of concrete. Just the bolts holding together the structure weigh 10 tonnes. It is also the largest inflated unsupported dome in the world. 

The antenna continued to receive satellite transmissions till 1985. The location was then classed as a site of national historical importance. The huge horn antenna is unique since the twin antenna in the US has been dismantled.  

The Cité des Télécoms museum was opened in 1991 and the site is a corporate foundation supported by Orange. 

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Hyperscalers' needs drive a new class of coherent DSP

Coherent digital signal processors (DSPs) companies have supported two families of coherent chips for some time. That's because no single coherent DSP can meet all the market's requirements.

The coherent DSP used for highest-performance optical transmissions must include advanced coding techniques, forward error correction, and a high symbol rate to send as much data as possible on a single wavelength and maximise reach.

Helen Xenos at NGON & DCI World

In contrast, a DSP for coherent pluggable modules needs to be power-efficient and compact to meet the optical module's power envelope and size constraints; a 400ZR QSFP-DD and a CFP2-DCO 400ZR+ being examples.

According to Ciena, now there is a need for a third category of coherent DSP for 1.6 terabit-per-second (Tbps) and 3.2Tbps transmissions over short distances for next-generation switch routers.

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Changing the radio access network for good

The industry initiative to open up the radio access network, known as open RAN, is changing how the mobile network is architected and is proving its detractors wrong.

So says a recent open RAN study by market research company, LightCounting.

Stéphane Téral

"The virtual RAN and open RAN sceptics are wrong," says Stéphane Téral, chief analyst at LightCounting.

Japan's mobile operators, Rakuten Mobile and NTT Docomo, lead the world with large-scale open RAN deployments.

Meanwhile, many leading communications service providers (CSPs) continue to trial the technology with substantial deployments planned around 2024-25.

Japan's fourth and newest mobile network operator, Rakuten Mobile, deployed 40,000 open RAN sites with 200,000 radio units by the start of 2022.

Meanwhile, NTT Docomo, Japan's largest mobile operator, deployed 10,000 sites in 2021 and will deploy another 10,000 this year.

NTT Docomo has shown that open RAN also benefits incumbent operators, not just new mobile entrants like Rakuten Mobile and Dish Networks in the US that can embrace the latest technologies as they roll out their networks.

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