OFC 2025 industry reflections - Part 3

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the OFC show in San Francisco. In the penultimate part, the contributions are from Cisco's Bill Gartner, Lumentum's Matt Sysak, Ramya Barna of Mixx Technologies, and Ericsson's Antonio Tartaglia.

San Francisco skyline. Source: Shutterstock

Bill Gartner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Optical Systems and Optics, Cisco  

There was certainly much buzz around co-packaged optics at Nvidia’s GTC event, and that carried over into OFC.

The prevailing thinking seems to be that large-scale co-packaged optics deployment is years away. While co-packaged optics has many benefits, there are challenges that need to be overcome before that happens.

Existing solutions, such as linear pluggable optics (LPO), continue to be discussed as interim solutions that could achieve close to the power savings of co-packaged optics and preserve a multi-vendor pluggable market. That development in the industry will be an intermediate solution before co-packaged optics is required.

Click to read more ...

OFC Rump Session: Reimagining global comms

Source: Shutterstock

Imagine a world plunged into digital silence. No texts, calls, emails, or internet.

At this year's OFC conference in San Francisco, three teams of telecommunications experts will tackle a provocative thought experiment as part of the Rump Session: if Earth's entire communication infrastructure vanished overnight, how would they rebuild it? 

With a clean slate and ten years until implementation, the teams will outline what they consider is the ideal replacement global network.

The Rump Session's audience will then choose the best solution.

Click to read more ...