The Lightwave Blog

Posted by Stephen Hardy

Quickly reviewing my reporter's notebook while I chomp on a bagel in the press room Thursday morning, here's what I find:

Net Insight, which has ridden its DTM technology to success in the video broadcast market, hopes to make a bigger name for itself in North America through support of telepresence and multiservice delivery...Mintera execs Terry Unter (pres and CEO) and Niall Robinson (VP, prod marketing) claim that they've shipped their 40G transponders to "seven or eight" customers, five of whom have designed the module into a system -- and, in some cases, more than one...Speaking of 40G, rumor has it that the "high speed" company Opnext currently is looking at most closely for acquisition (see blog post below) is StrataLight Communications...Having speculated in the same blog post that it might make sense for Opnext to look at CoreOptics, I asked Saeid Aramideh, VP of global sales, marketing and business Development, about the possibility. He said his company sees itself as a consolidator, not a consolidatee -- and hinted that CoreOptics might prove that in the reasonably near future...Everyone is talking about having an RF return path capability on their PON or other FTTX product to address the MSO market as well as other carriers who want to add on-demand services without abandoning their current RF infrastructure. EPON vendor Alloptic claims that at least some of the GPON vendors touting this capability are using their technology -- which they refuse to sell to other EPON vendors...For every vendor touting WDM-PON at the show (and there are several), there's another saying that there probably isn't much of a market for it between now and the time more affordable 10G PON technology will be available...While the OIF has given its blessing to dual-polarization QPSK for 100G transport, neither Hitachi Telecom nor Adva Optical Networking think that's the right way to go. They don't seem too concerned about the OIF's current direction. If AT&T; or Verizon announced they'd prefer a different modulation format, the OIF would undoubtedly pull an about-face, one source speculated.

More to come later...

Labels: 100G, 40G, NXTcomm, PON, WDM-PON

Posted by Stephen Hardy

NXTcomm is in full swing, with the buzz surrounding high-speed networking and FTTH, particularly WDM-PON, attaining the anticipated high pitch. The most interesting thing I've heard about so far, in fact, pertains to WDM-PON, specifically Tellabs' upcoming work for the SARDANA program funded by the European Commission.

SARDANA stands for "Scalable Advance Ring-based passive Dense Access Network Architecture." As the name implies, the goal of the three-year program is to develop a ring-based WDM-PON architecture with a reach of around 100 km. (You can read more about it at the project's website.) The key to the extended reach is including amplification in the network. According to Tellabs, they plan to base the amplification on EDFA technology. But how do you put EDFAs, which require power for the pump laser, into an passive network infrastructure? You "disintegrate" it, Tellabs says; you put the pump laser function in the central office, where you already have power, shoot the pump laser light down the network on one of the PON wavelengths, and have passive amplification units that leverage the pump to amplify the surrounding wavelengths.

If it works, Tellabs thinks they can find more applications for it beyond SARDANA. I bet they can too.

Labels: FTTH, Tellabs, WDM-PON