Open XR Forum expands membership, launches new white paper

News and Business

Open XR Forum has announced that AT&T, Colt, Crown Castle, Telefónica, and ZAYO have joined the industry initiative and MSA effort to advance the deployment of software-configurable point-to-point and point-to-multipoint coherent optical networks, utilizing XR optics pluggable transceiver technology. Open XR Forum is a consortium bringing together network operators, equipment vendors, and component suppliers committed to building the foundation for a new generation of coherent optical solutions that will cost-effectively meet demand for greater network scalability and flexibility. XR optics is the industry’s first coherent optical solution that can solve the access and aggregation challenges faced by network operators caused by the misalignment between network traffic patterns and the technology used to transport that traffic.

The Forum also released the “Open XR Concept Introductory White Paper,” available for download from the Open XR Forum site. The white paper describes the limitations and shortcomings of today’s point-to-point optical networks and the inherent performance, cost-effectiveness, and network agility benefits of point-to-multipoint coherent optical networks utilizing digital subcarriers. The white paper also presents key technical design considerations along with network management and control concepts and highlights a number of important application scenarios.

The overriding objective of Open XR Forum is to dramatically reduce network total cost of ownership by simplifying network architectures, enabling dynamic and on-demand capacity allocation, and implementing software and component technologies that are compatible across multiple generations of optical technologies.

For more information, visit www.openxrforum.org.