Kaiam Corp. has secured $16 million (€12.3 million) in C-round funding and has completed the acquisition of Gemfire. With the acquisition, Kaiam gains planar lightwave circuit (PLC) technology and Gemfire’s 8-inch wafer fab in Scotland. The start-up has developed hybrid integration technology that achieves sub-micron alignment yet only requires standard electronic assembly tools. […]
Avago Technologies has announced a definitive agreement to acquire optical component player CyOptics. The value of the acquisition, at $400 million (€304 million), is double CyOptics’ revenues in 2012. CyOptics’ sales were $210 million (€160 million) last year, up 21 percent from the previous year. Avago’s acquisition will make it the optical component […]
2012 was a very important year for fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) adoption in Europe, according to IDATE, the analyst firm that compiles the FTTH Market Panorama for the FTTH Council Europe. About 35% of subscribers in the European region, including Russia and its neighbours, were new subscribers during the year. “Fibre to the home is starting to […]
Investing in broadband infrastructure is not a priority for Europe, judging by recent developments at the European Commission. The Commission had planned to invest €9.2 billion in broadband and digital services, but budget cuts have reduced that amount to just €1 billion. The money was part of the “Connecting Europe Facility”, which had […]
Alcatel-Lucent’s research arm, Bell Labs, has used high-speed electronics to enable Terabit long-haul transmission using two optical carriers only. Several vendors have already demonstrated Terabit transmission including Alcatel-Lucent, but the company is claiming an industry first in using two multiplexed carriers only. “There is a tradeoff between the speed of electronics and the number […]
The Dell’Oro Group forecasts that the global optical transport market will grow to $13 billion (€9.6 billion) in 2017, equating to a 10-percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). In 2012 SONET/SDH sales declined by over 20 percent, greater than Dell’Oro expected, while WDM equipment sales held their own. Dell’Oro expects optical transport growth across […]
NeoPhotonics, an optical components manufacturer, has agreed to acquire the semiconductor optical components business unit of Lapis Semiconductor, which develops lasers, drivers, and detectors for high speed 100G applications. Lapis Semiconductor is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rohm in Japan. The business is to be acquired by NeoPhotonics Japanese subsidiary, NeoPhotonics Semiconductor GK, which has agreed to pay […]
Nokia Siemens Networks has decided that optical networking isn’t central to its strategy after all. The troubled company has reached an agreement to sell its optical business to Marlin Equity Partners for an undisclosed sum. Last year Nokia Siemens said it would shed 17,000 jobs as part of drive to save €1 billion […]
Accelink Technologies has acquired the Danish planar lightwave circuit (PLC) company, Ignis Photonyx A/S. The Chinese optical component player has paid US$ 2.6 million (€2.0 million) for the company, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary. Accelink has also agreed to spend US$ 5.4 million (€4.2 million) to upgrade facilities and contribute to the […]
A new report by Dell’Oro Group says the total WDM market, comprising both metro and long-haul applications, is forecast to reach $8 billion for the full year 2012 – exceeding the telecom high point of 2000 for the first time. “It was the year 2000 when the WDM market peaked at $7.7 billion […]
One of the European Union’s most ambitious targets is to make sure that all its citizens can get access to superfast broadband at home by 2020. A new study by Point Topic shows that Europe is now halfway towards achieving that aim. The study has been produced for DG Connect, the department of […]
The optical industry loves a good debate about standards! The current generation of Ethernet standards was controversial, being the first where two standards – 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet – were developed simultaneously. The same debate about what the next generation of Ethernet should look like is now in full swing. In August, […]
ZTE claims to have set a new world record for 400G high-speed optical transmission based on single-carrier DWDM. The Chinese vendor presented a paper about its work at ECOC in Amsterdam. In the experiment, ZTE successfully transmitted 40 channels, each carrying 400Gbps, over 2800km of standard singlemode fibre arranged in 35 spans, with […]
Team members of MODE-GAP, an European collaborative R&D project that is part of the EU 7th Framework Programme on next-generation internet infrastructure, presented no fewer than three post-deadline papers at the ECOC 2012 conference in Amsterdam. Now half-way through its four year programme, the MODE-GAP project is exploring ways to increase the capacity […]
NeoPhotonics has announced a multiport mode coupling receiver (MCR) transceiver that enables operators to boost the efficiency of their fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks by connecting up to four times as many homes to each existing OLT slot in a central office. One common approach to reduce the cost of FTTH installation is to keep […]