Optical industry restructuring: The analysts' view

The view that the optical industry is due a shake-up has been aired periodically over the last decade. Yet the industry's structure has remained intact. Now, with the depressed state of the telecom industry, the spectre of impending restructuring is again being raised.

In Part 2, Gazettabyte asked several market research analysts - Heavy Reading's Sterling Perrin, Ovum's Daryl Inniss and Dell'Oro's Jimmy Yu - for their views.

Part II: The analysts' view

"It is just a very slow, grinding process of adjustment; I am not sure that the next five years will be any different to what we've seen"

Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading

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60-second interview with .... Dell'Oro's Jimmy Yu

Market research firm Dell'Oro Group has reported that the global optical transport equipment market in the first half of 2012 shrank 5 percent, to US $6.1 billion. In the latest 60-second interview, Gazettabyte spoke with Jimmy Yu, vice president of optical transport research at Dell’Oro Group.

"For the year, it is going to be a fivefold growth rate [for 100 Gig transport]."

Jimmy Yu, Dell'Oro

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The uphill battle to keep pace with bandwidth demand

Relative traffic increase normalised to 2010 Source: IEEE

Optical component and system vendors will be increasingly challenged to meet the expected growth in bandwidth demand.

According to a recent comprehensive study by the IEEE (The IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report), bandwidth requirements are set to grow 10x by 2015 compared to demand in 2010, and a further 10x between 2015 and 2020. Meanwhile, the technical challenges are growing for the vendors developing optical transmission equipment and short-reach high-speed optical interfaces. 

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The next high-speed Ethernet standard starts to take shape

Source: Gazettabyte

The IEEE has begun work to develop the next-speed Ethernet standard beyond 100 Gigabit to address significant predicted growth in bandwidth demand. 

The standards body has set up the IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group, chaired by John D’Ambrosia, who previously chaired the 40 and 100 Gigabit IEEE P802.3ba Ethernet standards ratified in June 2010. "I guess I’m a glutton for punishment,” quips D'Ambrosia. 

The Higher Speed Ethernet standard could be completed by early 2017. 

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Briefing: Flexible elastic-bandwidth networks

Vendors and service providers are implementing the first examples of flexible, elastic-bandwidth networks. Infinera and Microsoft detailed one such network at the Layer123 Terabit Optical and Data Networking conference held earlier this year.

Optical networking expert Ioannis Tomkos of the Athens Information Technology Center explains what is flexible, elastic bandwidth.

Part 1: Flexible elastic bandwidth

"We cannot design anymore optical networks assuming that the available fibre capacity is abundant" 

Prof. Tomkos

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AppliedMicro samples 100Gbps CMOS multiplexer

AppliedMicro has announced the first CMOS merchant multiplexer chip for 100Gbps coherent optical transmission. The S28032 device supports dual polarisation, quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) and has a power consumption of 4W, half that of current multiplexer chip designs implemented in BiCMOS.

The S28032 100 Gig multiplexer IC. Source: AppliedMicro

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Cortina unveils multi-channel dispersion compensation chip

Cortina Systems has announced its latest electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) chip.  The CS4342 is a compact device that supports eight duplex 10 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) links. 

"Some customers are doing 2,000 signals at 10 Gig across the backplane"

Scott Feller, Cortina 

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