IOWN’s all-photonic network vision

What is the best way to send large amounts of data between locations? Its a question made all the more relevant with the advent of AI, and one that has been preoccupying the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) Global Forum that has now over 160 member companies and organisations

Masahisa KawashimaOptical networking has long established itself as the high-speed communications technology of choice for linking data centres or large enterprises’ sites.

The IOWN Global Forum aims to take optical networking a step further by enabling an all-optical network, to reduce the energy consumption and latency of communication links. Latency refers to the time it takes transmitted data to start arriving at the receiver site.

"The IOWN all-photonic network is the infrastructure for future enterprise networking," says Masahisa Kawashima, IOWN technology director, IOWN development office, NTT Technology working group chair, IOWN Global Forum.

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Nokia picks Infinera to boost its optical networking arm

Nokia has announced its intention to buy optical networking specialist Infinera for $2.3 billion. 

The motivation for the Infinera acquisition is scale, said Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark, during an analyst call detailing the announcement. 

Jimmy Yu, Dell'Oro Group

Optical networking is how communications service providers and hyperscalers cope with the exponential traffic growth. 

Continual innovation is required to reduce the cost and power consumed to transport such traffic. For a systems vendor, having scale helps meet these aims.

Optical networking wasn't always central to Nokia's strategy. In 2013, Nokia sold its optical networking arm to Marlin Equity Partners, which became Coriant.

Now, Nokia wants to be a leading optical networking vendor by acquiring Infinera, a company that bought Coriant in 2018.   

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Marvell kickstarts the 800G coherent pluggable era

Marvell has become the first company to provide an 800-gigabit coherent digital signal processor (DSP) for use in pluggable optical modules.

The 5nm CMOS Orion chip supports a symbol rate of over 130 gigabaud (GBd), more than double that of the coherent DSPs for the OIF's 400ZR standard and 400ZR+.

Meanwhile, a CFP2-DCO pluggable module using the Orion can transmit a 400-gigabit data payload over 2,000km using the quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation scheme.

The Orion DSP announcement is timely, given how this year will be the first when coherent pluggables exceed embedded coherent module port shipments.

This is the year coherent pluggable modules exceed embedded coherent port shipments. Source: LightCounting

"We strongly believe that pluggable coherent modules will cover most network use cases, including carrier and cloud data centre interconnect," says Samuel Liu, senior director of coherent DSP marketing at Marvell.

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