DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), the organisation that operates the pan-European GÉANT research and education network, says it installed and activated 2 Tbps of capacity and provisioned a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) service in less than 12 minutes combined. The pan-European network operator used production DTN-X platforms from Infinera, which […]
News and BusinessThis year sales of 100G optical network technology are expected to top $1 billion for the first time – they already hit this number on an annualized basis in the first quarter of 2013 (1Q13), according to the latest market report from Ovum. The general outlook for the optical networking equipment market is less […]
Alcatel-Lucent has created a business venture that plans to use software defined networking (SDN) to address data centre networking bottlenecks. The internal start-up, Nuage Networks, is tackling network connectivity within and between data centres. Networking in the data centre connects computing and storage resources. Servers and storage have largely undergone virtualisation such that […]
Optical transceiver developer Effdon Networks has demonstrated a 100Gbps CFP module with an 80km reach, which it claims is an industry first. The start-up has also developed the Qbox, a one-rack unit (1RU) extended-reach platform capable of 400–800Gbps and an 80–200km reach. The CFP is based on the 10×10 MSA. “We have managed […]
Huawei Technologies Co Ltd. says it has developed a prototype optical transceiver with embedded optical time-domain reflectometer (eOTDR) functionality. This could significantly reduce the cost of troubleshooting in fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks, the company claims. An OTDR detects backscattered light in optical fibres and uses this information to compute the location of faults. Traditionally, […]
Silicon photonics is gathering speed, judging by the increasing number of foundry services that enable optical developers to share wafers and prototyping costs. The latest is available via US semiconductor foundry MOSIS, which has partnered with ePIXfab, the European support centre that coordinates low-cost multi-project wafer services for silicon photonic integrated circuits (ICs).
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. […]
Vitesse Semiconductor has detailed its latest Carrier Ethernet access switch for mobile backhaul, cloud and enterprise services. The Serval-2 chip boosts Vitesse’s existing access switch offerings by adding 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports and near-tripling the switching capacity to 32Gbps; the Serval-2 has 2x10GbE and 12x1GbE ports. The device features Vitesse’s service aware architecture […]
Luxtera and Kotura have both demonstrated 100 Gbps QSFP optical modules based on silicon photonics technology. The Luxtera QSFP is a four-channel integrated transceiver that uses a single laser and is tailored for 500m although Luxtera says it can achieve 2km. The Kotura QSFP, in contrast, uses two chips, has a reach of […]
Optical switch specialist Calient Technologies and data centre switch developer Plexxi have joined forces to bring the benefits of a software-defined optical layer – namely increased flexibility and efficiency with decreased complexity – into the data centre environment. The integrated products were displayed at OFC/NFOEC in March. Aimed at large-scale data centres, this integration employs the major […]
Australian incumbent Telstra has successfully tested out 1Tbps optical transmission on a 995km link between Sydney and Melbourne using equipment from Ericsson. Ericsson said the test showed that 1Tbps technology can be deployed in a real network environment. Last month, Ericsson announced at Mobile World Congress that it had signed a deal to […]
Oclaro has unveiled an add/drop routing platform aimed at next-generation colourless, directionless, contentionless (CDC) and flexible grid ROADMs. The platform can be tailored to a system vendor’s requirements and includes such functions as crossconnect switching, arrayed amplifiers and optical channel monitors. After working with system vendors on various line card designs, Oclaro realised […]
The first CFP2 transceivers for singlemode and multimode client-side applications in optical networks have arrived. Cisco Systems has also demonstrated the CPAK, its own transceiver alternative to the CFP2. The announcements were made at the recent OFC/NFOEC exhibition held in Anaheim, California. The CFP2 is the next pluggable form factor after the CFP and is […]
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 […]
The market for metro packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) is entering a new phase with platforms adopting packet-only implementations, Optical Transport Network (OTN) switching and 100G transport. These are the main findings of a survey of over 100 operators conducted by market research firm Heavy Reading. One surprise from the survey is the tremendous […]
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and Fujitsu Research and Development Center Co., Ltd. of China have been working on an optical technology that can achieve 100Gbps transmission speeds using commercial components intended for 10Gbps networking. The modulation technique they have adopted is Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT), which is widely used in DSL equipment but is not usually applied […]
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 […]
A slew of optical transceiver announcements are expected in the coming days to coincide with the upcoming OFC/NFOEC conference and exhibition. The first CFP2 products – the CFP MSA’s 40G and 100G optical transceiver form factor that follows on from the CFP – are expected, as is further news of Cisco Systems’ own in-house CPAK […]
Semiconductor specialist GigOptix, Inc. has partnered with the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute (HHI) in Germany to develop a volume production process for 100Gbps pluggable CFP and CFP2 optical transceiver modules based on polymer technology. CFP modules support high-speed telecom applications such as coherent 100Gbps optical transmission. “This partnership combines the best 100-Gbps polymer technologies […]