ECOC 2025 industry reflections - Part 2

Part 2: More industry figures share their thoughts after attending ECOC 2025 in Copenhagen: Lumentum's Rafik Ward, Scintil Photonics' CEO, Matt Crowley, Rob Shore of Nokia, and Jeff Hutchins of the OIF and Ranovus. 

Nokia's stand at ECOC.

Rafik Ward, Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Lumentum

At ECOC 2025, I saw a nice uptick in the discussion about co-packaged optics with a clearer view to commercialisation.

While co-packaged optics has been discussed for nearly a decade, we are moving from a world of pretty slides and architecture diagrams to one where increasingly large statistical data sets are shown. Meta showed co-packaged optics data over 15 million port hours with significant improvements with regard link failures. Similarly, Broadcom has been showing statistical performance across increasingly large datasets in the last year.

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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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OFC 2024 reflects a mature industry with new offshoots

• The three General Chairs preview the upcoming Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference and discuss photonics developments and trends.
• The General Chairs' role is to choose the plenary speakers, programme theme, and conference schedule.
• OFC takes place during March 24th-28th in San Diego, CA.*

Photonics, at least for traditional applications, has become a mature industry. So says Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, one of this year's OFC General Chairs.

Professor Dimitra Simeonidou

By traditional, Simeonidou is referring to classical optical communications.

But she also stresses new developments: the use of optical fibres for environmental sensing, optics for satellites, and quantum.

"Quantum is like a micro-OFC," says Simeonidou. "You have issues from technology to subsystem to system applications now appearing in the OFC programmes."

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The OIF's coherent optics work gets a ZR+ rating

The OIF has started work on a 1600ZR+ standard to enable the sending of 1.6 terabits of data across hundreds of kilometres of optical fibre. 

The initiative follows the OIF's announcement last September that it had kicked off 1600ZR. ZR refers to an extended reach standard, sending 1.6 terabits over an 80-120km point-to-point link. 

1600ZR follows the OIF's previous work standardising the 400-gigabit 400ZR and the 800-gigabit 800ZR coherent pluggable optics.      

The decision to address a 'ZR+' standard is a first for the OIF. Until now, only the OpenZR+ Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) and the OpenROADM MSA developed interoperable ZR+ optics.

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Optical transmission: sending more data over a greater reach

• Keysight Technologies' chart plots the record-setting optical transmission systems of recent years.

Source: Keysight Technologies

The chart, compiled by Dr Fabio Pittalá, product planner, broadband and photonic center of excellence at Keysight, is an update of one previously published by Gazettabyte. 

The latest chart adds data from last year's conferences at OFC 2023 and ECOC 2023. And new optical transmission achievements can be expected at the upcoming OFC 2024 show, to be held in San Diego, CA in March.

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Working at the limit of optical transmission performance

• Expect to see new optical transmission records at the upcoming ECOC 2023 conference. 
• Keysight Technologies' chart plots the record-setting optical transmission systems of recent years.
• The chart reveals optical transmission performance issues and the importance of the high-speed converters between the analogue and digital domains for test equipment and, by implication, for coherent digital signal processors (DSPs).

Graphic explanation

Shown is the net bit rate plotted against the baud rate. Also shown are lines with the number of bits per symbol. These are not the bit resolution of the DAC but the bits for both polarisations. For example, 14bit/symbol refers to 7-bit per polarisation. The DACs making up the transmission systems plotted are either 6-bit or 8-bit. Source: Keysight

Engineers keep advancing optical systems to send more data across an optical fibre.

It requires advances in optical and electronic components that can process faster, higher-bandwidth signals, and that includes the most essential electronics part of all: the coherent DSP chip. 

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Nokia jumps a class with its PSE-6s coherent modem

• The 130 gigabaud (GBd) PSE-6s coherent modem is Nokia's first in-house design for high-end optical transport systems 
• The PSE-6s can send an 800 gigabit Ethernet (800GbE) payload over 2,000km and 1.2 terabits of data over 100km.
• Two PSE-6s DSPs can send three 800GbE signals over two 1.2-terabit wavelengths

Nokia has unveiled its latest coherent modem, the super coherent Photonic Service Engine 6s (PSE-6s) that will power its optical transport platforms in the coming years.

The PSE-6s comes three years after Nokia announced its current generation of coherent digital signal processors (DSPs): the PSE-Vs DSP for the long-haul and the compact PSE-Vc for the coherent pluggable market.

Nokia is only detailing the PSE-6s; its next-generation coherent modem for pluggables will be a future announcement.

Nokia will demonstrate the PSE-6s at the upcoming OFC show in March while field trials involving systems using the PSE-6s will start in the year's second half. 

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