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OPINION METRO NETWORKS
So where is the metro market headed? One
trend that has been impossible to ignore is the emerging impact of digital media companies like Google and Facebook, with their ever-growing data centre capacity requirements and surging demand for internal and external connectivity. Tese companies not only tailor systems according to their needs, dissecting classical telecom offerings, but also begin to apply their own rules to the equipment sector, leading to shorter deployment cycles governed even more fiercely by cost, density and power consumption. Products designed for the particular
requirements of the data centre are emerging, but their mere existence highlights a basic uncertainty about the needs of the market. Platforms to please the data centre mind-set include a stripped-down, pizza-box size element performing one single function – the multiplexing of Ethernet onto an optical fibre. Other examples include optics multi-source agreements (MSAs) such as CWDM4, PSM4, CLR4 or OpenOptics, which promise to deliver much lower cost 500m–2km reach
transceivers compared to the classical 10-km LR4 interface. Here, in particular, silicon photonics
start-ups are attempting to challenge established players. And this is where datacom technology starts to spill over into the telecom sector. For example the OpenOptics alliance is developing its 2km-reach 4 x 28G silicon photonics-based optics at 1550nm, and could apply this technology to the line-side for shorter, sub-80-km, single-span interconnects. A robust direct-detection approach to higher speeds would be possible, for example, when combined with 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4). PAM4 devices are being introduced to cover applications as wide as active optical cables, backplane connectivity, or consumer cables, and could spill over onto coloured optical interfaces. So what is a possible future scenario?
Coherent flexible-rate is one option in this evolving landscape. However, we believe a combination of direct-detect and coherent interfaces is required to address the whole of the market, and the future dynamics of these
technologies cannot be easily predicted. In metro applications, silicon photonics would enable highly-parallelised, inexpensive direct-detect interfaces with little or no DSP processing required. If direct-detect technology can get ahead of
the coherent curve, we might see a shiſt in network architectures. For the majority of applications, metro networks could be simplified with point-to-point single-span connectivity with electrical switching and grooming at the junction nodes, without requiring any sophisticated optical infrastructure or its accompanying network management. Anyone who was hoping to see 200G 16QAM and Raman amplification in the metro will probably be disappointed. Ultimately, the data centre mind-set could,
we believe, capture and completely change a significant portion of classical metro network architectures. Tus, a direct-detect pluggable may well be the future of metro 100G.l
Dr Maxim Kuschnerov is a product manager for DWDM technology at Coriant, Munich, responsible for high-speed interfaces and photonic layer technology
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