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.

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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Taking a unique angle to platform design

• A novel design based on a vertical line card shortens the trace length between an ASIC and pluggable modules.
• Reducing the trace length improves signal integrity while maintaining the merits of using pluggables.
• Using the vertical line card design will extend for at least two more generations the use of pluggables with Ethernet switches.

The travelling salesperson problem involves working out the shortest route on a round-trip to multiple cities. It's a well-known complex optimisation problem.

Chris Cole

Systems engineers face their own complex optimisation problem just sending an electrical signal between two points, connecting an Ethernet switch chip to a pluggable optical module, for example.

Sending the high-speed signal over the link with sufficient fidelity for its recovery requires considerable electronic engineering design skills. And with each generation of electrical signalling, link distances are getting shorter.

In a paper presented at the recent ECOC show, held in Basel, consultant Chris Cole, working with Yamaichi Electronics, outlined a novel design that shortens the distance between an Ethernet switch chip and the front-panel optics.

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ECOC '22 Reflections - Part 2

Gazettabyte is asking industry and academic figures for their thoughts after attending ECOC 2022, held in Basel, Switzerland. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned, and what, if anything, surprised them. 

maytikka, Shutterstock.com

In Part 2, Broadcom‘s Rajiv Pancholy, optical communications advisor, Chris Cole, LightCouting’s Vladimir Kozlov, Ciena’s Helen Xenos, and Synopsys’ Twan Korthorst share their thoughts.

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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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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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