ANALYSIS & OPINION: SHOW REVIEW


OFC 2019 played host to some 15,400 delegates Te other key challenge going forward, said


Ho, is the cost of chip development. ‘Te next node we are coming toward is the 7nm, the development costs for which are roughly $300 million. Scale will increasingly mater. It is easier for larger-scale vendors to move R&D around.’


Money maters Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO at LightCounting Market Research, also addressed monetary issues during the panel discussion, stating: ‘It’s an exciting time in the industry. Te demand for optics is very strong, why are we bringing up the worrying question of pricing? Te reason it’s such a problem that we have, is sales of optical transceivers declined last year for the first time in many years.’ He explained that, from 2011 until 2015, price


declines were strong, but that, surprisingly, the market did not go through the usual three- year cycle. ‘So,’ he said, ‘there were two years where the demand was very strong but in 2013 demand actually broke by a factor of two, so the market didn’t decrease in terms of units shipped, but it still declined because there were so many suppliers looking for business. ‘It’s almost like whatever happens, prices


decline,’ he reasoned. ‘And, in fibre-to-the-home, it was changes in the supply chain that actually supported such low prices over time. What we are seeing is a change from vertically integrated suppliers of transceivers to a spiralised kind of supply chain, where we can choose types of suppliers. Tat type of arrangement supported


www.fibre-systems.com @fibresystemsmag


the fibre-to-the-home market and supported this low price, so the reason I bring it up is that I want to compare it with what’s happening in the Ethernet and DWDM markets. If we look at average prices of products in different market segments, the average product prices for these markets is actually prety stable.’


What’s next? Kozlov atributes this to new innovations, and Cignal AI’s Andrew Schmit took to the stage to look at a number of industry trends, including what is coming next. ‘Almost 10 years ago I talked about a re-boot,


and we’re due for something big, but what is that going to be?’ Touching on vertical integration, which has


‘historically resulted in market success,’ Schmit also discussed the trend for disaggregation, pointing out that its definition has changed over time, its value is not entirely clear in all places, and that not all operators believe the complexity is justified. Looking at coherent technology, Schmit said that the time-to-volume decreases with every generation. ‘Te big deal,’ he said, ‘is fourth generation coherent. It’s not about making it faster, it’s about higher volume and making it cheaper.’ He put investment in fourth generation components at $500 million. Indeed, in the run-up to the show, a number


of companies announced their next generation coherent chipsets/transceivers, with the notable ICE6 from Infinera engineered to deliver up to 800Gb/s per wavelength, and Ciena’s latest


THE BIG DEAL IS FOURTH GENERATION COHERENT


range of WaveLogic technology, which includes a single-wavelength 800G solution.


A big deal Contemplating what could come next, Schmit cited pluggable WDM as ‘a big deal,’ alongside 400ZR and 400ZR+, and this was reflected on the show floor, with several live multivendor interoperability demonstrations, including Coherent Transceiver Interoperability, Ethernet Alliance, OIF and Open ROADM MSA SDN. Technologies from around 40 different vendors were featured in these demonstrations, including 400ZR, and also 10GbE, 25GbE, 50GbE, 100GbE, 400GbE; Open Source Open ROADM SDN Controller; pluggable CFP2-ACO and CFP2-DCO modules; and Common Electrical I/O (CEI)-112G, FlexE (Flex Ethernet). On the array of technology at the event, Ho said: ‘Key emerging trends to look out for from the industry and vendors, based on the conference, include 600G/800G optics and systems and 400ZR for the hyperscale cloud data centres.’ Meanwhile, Schmit concluded his presentation quoting the line: ‘Old soldiers never die, they just fade away,’ adding, ‘I think that’s going to happen to the stand-alone optical hardware business.’ OFC 2020 will be held from 8 to 12 March in


San Diego. n Issue 24 n Summer 2019 n FiBRE SYSTEMS 11


Credit: OFC


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40