OFC 2025: reflecting on the busiest optics show in years

Adtran's Gareth Spence interviews Omdia's Daryl Inniss (left) and the editor of Gazettabyte, live from the conference hall at OFC 2025. 

The discussion covers the hot topics of the show and where the industry is headed next. Click here.

Adtran broadens its OLS and access module offerings

Adtran has unveiled two products before the OFC show in San Francisco taking place at the end of the month. 

One is a 50 gigabit-per second (Gbps) SFP56 optical transceiver that uses 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) for 5G front-haul and enhanced broadband applications.  

The second product is the FSP 3000 IP OLS, a compact open line system (OLS) designed for point-to-point links between sites 120km apart. 

The OLS has been developed to simplify the setting up of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical links.    

Click to read more ...

Podcast: Reflections on the upcoming OFC 2025

Click here for the podcast 

Podcast: Is AI driving a new wave of photonic innovation?

AI is still in its infancy, but it’s already pushing the photonics and computing industries to rethink product roadmaps and drive new levels of innovation.

Adtran's Gareth Spence talks with authors and analysts Daryl Inniss and the editor of Gazettabyte about the fast pace of AI development and the changes needed to unlock its full potential. They also discuss the upcoming sequel to their book on silicon photonics and its focus on AI. 

To listen to the podcast, click here.

Click to read more ...

ECOC 2024 industry reflections - Final Part

In the final part, industry figures share their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Contributions are from Adtran’s Jörg-Peter Elbers, Lightwave Logic’s Michael Lebby, and Heavy Reading’s Sterling Perrin.

ECOC exhibition floor

Jörg-Peter Elbers, senior vice presendent, advanced technology, standards and IPR, Adtran, and a General Chair at this year’s ECOC.

ECOC celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. It was great to see scientists, engineers, and industry leaders from all around the globe at a vibrant gathering in Frankfurt.

ECOC dates to September 1975 when the inaugural event – dubbed the “European Conference on Optical Fiber Technology” - was held in London. In the early days, the focus was on megabit-per-second transmission for telephony applications. Now, we are advancing to petabit-per-second speeds to meet AI and cloud services demands. 

Click to read more ...

First 50G-PON merchant silicon spurs operator trials

Broadcom has unveiled the industry’s first merchant silicon for the 50-gigabit passive optical network (50G-PON) access standard. Until now, only access equipment players such as Huawei and ZTE had their own 50G-PON silicon.  

A 50G-PON network. Source: Adtran.

Broadcom has announced two 50G-PON devices: an optical line terminal (OLT) chip and the optical networking unit (ONU) 50-PON port to the users.  Both chips include custom hardware from Broadcom to run artificial intelligence (AI) machine-learning algorithms. 

Jim Muth, senior manager of product marketing at Broadcom, says supporting AI benefits the operator and the quality of the end user’s broadband service. 

Click to read more ...

ECOC 2024: AI and Optics

Being interview by Gareth Spence of Adtran at the recent ECOC 2024 conference and exhibition

click here