The Lightwave Blog

Posted by Stephen Hardy

Paul Bonenfant, communications components analyst at Morgan Keegan & Co., released a note today saying his sources suggest that DWDM supplier OpVista may be on its last legs. Bonenfant says "industry chatter" indicates that the company has furloughed staff and is searching for a buyer; if it doesn't find one, it could close as early as this week. Bonenfant suggests that Emcore is the company most likely to snap up OpVista's assets.

Contacted for comment, an OpVista source offered an interview with President and CEO Karl May scheduled for tomorrow, February 25, at noon EST. (February 25 update: Read the results of the interview.)

OpVista has seen most of its success in the cable-TV space; it includes Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable on its international roster of customers. Its differentiation is the ability to cram multiple wavelengths into the space normally required for one. The company leveraged this technology last year to introduce its CX8 optical networking system, a 40-Gbps platform that used what the company called "Dense Multi-Carrier" technology to transmit four 10-Gbps wavelengths in each window of the ITU-T grid. The transmission would therefore act much like a 10-Gbps transmission, which would enable carriers to maintain their current 10-Gbps network design rules and obviate concerns about such impairments as polarization mode dispersion.

The company also offers ROADM capabilities.

You can see a video interview with Karl May on the Lightwave Channel.

Labels: OpVista, ROADM