Tag Archives: Fiber optics

Updates from Ciena

Posted on October 9, 2018 by | Leave a comment

4 ways an Adaptive Network can overcome today’s challenges and take your network to the next level
By Françoise Pouliquen – There is a relentless push-pull from rapid business and technology change affecting operators today. On one hand, dramatic growth in subscriber demands are driving fronthaul and backhaul traffic and putting networks under intense pressure. While on the other, there’s an industry wide race to develop and commercialize new revenue-generating services, such as IoT use cases and 5G mobile services – and to implement the network technologies and architectures needed to support and deliver them. On top of that, new market entrants, including some of the largest internet companies, are deploying massive-scale network connections that support low-cost data transport between key locations and data centers with unrivalled economies of scale.

The challenges for operators are; how to take exponential traffic growth in stride; how to prepare the network for the next-generation of IoT and 5G use cases; and how to remain competitive on price with large connectivity providers in the market.

Here are four key ways an Adaptive Network can help:

  • Increasing network agility and efficiency
  • Future-proofing the network with industry leading packet-optical solutions
  • Helping avoid vendor lock-in with open networking
  • Driving network innovation in strategic partnership

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on September 11, 2018 by | Leave a comment

The Future of the Internet Is Fiber Deep
By Elias Cagiannos – Netflix is the poster child for over-the-top (OTT) content and has no doubt played a large role in shifting the status quo when it comes to our entertainment and viewing habits. The company can be credited with reimagining content distribution — investing in homegrown content and a content delivery network to feed our binge-viewing habits.

However, these habits are primarily supported on MSO networks, which have one of the best internet service products on the market. These companies are focused on the future, making investments in the people, processes and infrastructure necessary to help them match their capabilities to a new generation of users.

Consumer demand for improved viewing options has created an environment where MSOs can’t tolerate service disruptions or quality issues. However, aging coaxial plants, analog repeaters and limited spectrum make meeting customer demand for fast and reliable service a challenge. MSOs recognize this and are already moving in the right direction, but they will advance even faster with fiber deep — the concept by which operators push fiber closer to the end user, which helps improve service. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on August 21, 2018 by | Leave a comment

New Cignal AI report looks at past, present and future of coherent technology
By Kacie Levy – Cignal AI has published a new report, “Tracking the Deployment of Third Generation Coherent.”

Today’s third generation coherent has already arrived in the form of single-wavelength 400G-capable technology designed to keep pace with the tremendous pace of data growth. As one example, Equinix has forecast that by 2020, interconnect bandwidth will grow up to 5,000 Tb/s, with double-digit growth rates.

This Cignal AI report shows that the transition to third generation coherent technology is underway, and its effects are being felt throughout the optical market. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on June 21, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Why the Secret Behind Strong Early Adoption of 400G Technology is … 200G

By Helen Xenos – This month, we shipped our 5,000th 400G-capable coherent optical transponder, confirming our prediction that the use of 400G technology is ramping 3 times faster than 100G.  What may come as a surprise, however, is that the dominant application driving 400G deployments is not 400G, but 200G (long haul-datacenter interconnect to be precise).

Why? The technology that enables 400G wavelengths has a lot to do with expanding the application space for 200G as well.

To fully understand the demand drivers for 400G, it’s important to clarify the various ways 400G is defined. The term “400G” is quite popular in today’s optical networking conversations, but can also have different meanings depending on the context in which it is being used.

So, which applications are driving 400G deployments? We hear so much about the fast-growing metro WDM market, 400ZR and the need to maximize capacity for short reach DCI applications, that intuitively you would think this is the “sweet spot” application.

In fact, the most popular use case we see for early 400G adoption is to support the rise of 200G long-haul for aggressive DCI network builds. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on May 3, 2018 by | Leave a comment

From Land to Sea to Cloud
By Brian Lavallée – Submarine networks carry over 99% of all telecommunications traffic between continental landmasses making them easily classified as critical infrastructure. There’s also no “Plan B” for these submerged assets, so they’ll continue to act as the jugular veins of intercontinental connectivity for years to come and will thus require constant technology innovation to reliably and securely maintain this pivotal role.

But exactly what traffic is transported back and forth on seabeds around the world? According to respected industry analyst firm TeleGeography, it’s increasingly Data Center Interconnection (DCI) traffic, and LOTS of it.

It’s projected that Internet Content Providers (ICPs) will soon account for the majority of submarine traffic in all regions of the world. Impressive for a group of companies that just over a decade ago, were essentially non-players in the submarine networking market.

Given the astonishing amount of DCI traffic added to traditional wholesale traffic, several new technologies were introduced to address this extraordinary growth, which sits at around 40% CAGR worldwide, according to TeleGeography. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on March 29, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Coherent optical turns 10: Here’s how it was made
By Bo Gowan – This is the story of how a team of over 100 people in Ciena’s R&D labs pulled together an impressive collection of technology innovations that created a completely new way of transporting data over fiber…and in the processes helped change the direction of the entire optical networking industry.

Back in 2008, many in the industry had serious doubts that commercializing coherent fiber optic transport was even possible, much less the future of optical communications. That left a team of Ciena engineers to defy the naysayers and hold the torch of innovation.

“What we first began to see at Telecom 99 was that we could achieve these high speeds the brute force way, but it was really, really painful,” said Dino DiPerna in an interview.  Dino, along with many in his team, were brought on by Ciena as part of the company’s 2010 acquisition of Nortel’s optical business.  He now serves as Ciena’s Vice President of Packet-Optical Platforms R&D and is based in Ottawa.

By ‘brute force’ Dino is referring to the traditional time-division multiplexing (TDM) method that had been used until then to speed up optical transmission – basically turning the light on and off at increasingly faster speeds (also called the baud or symbol rate). “But once you start pushing past 10 billion times per second, you begin running into significant problems,” said DiPerna.

Those complexities had to do with the underlying boundaries of what you can do with light. The fundamental issue at hand was the natural spread and propagation of light as it travels along the fiber – created by two phenomenon called chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion, or PMD. As you push past 10G speeds, the tolerance to chromatic dispersion goes down with the square of the baud. Due to PMD and noise from optical amplifiers, a 40 Gbaud stream will lose at least 75% of its reach compared to a 10 Gbaud stream.

This reach limitation had two consequences. First, it meant adding more costly regenerators to the network. Second, it meant that the underlying fiber plant required a more expensive, high-quality fiber to operate properly at 40G transmission speeds. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on March 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Fiber Deep: Bringing bandwidth to the edge

By Elias Cagiannos – It is no secret that on-demand audio and video streaming services are surging as consumers turn away from traditional consumption models. In 2017, 54 percent of all TV households in the country had a Netflix subscription, up from 28 percent in 2011.

These services are using massive amounts of bandwidth and often free riding on top of Multi-Service Operators’ (MSOs) networks.

As I spend time meeting with Ciena’s MSO customers, I understand that pressures don’t stop there. For example, aging and inefficient analog infrastructures are hampering bandwidth growth. In turn, this is preventing them from introducing new services as higher speeds and symmetrical services such as picture and video storage in the cloud, social media and video chatting have become more important.

Not only do these infrastructures impede service agility, but the network is becoming increasingly complex to scale. MSOs are adding more equipment to address their dynamic needs – but lack the analytics and insights to proactively make the necessary changes and are instead constantly finding themselves having to react to problems. In today’s hyper-competitive market, this can make or break a MSO’s reputation when quality of experience means everything. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on March 14, 2018 by | Leave a comment

What is Fiber Densification?
By Helen Xenos – The term “network densification” is being used more often in relation to wireless network deployments, and more recently, “fiber densification” has become a hot a topic of discussion. So, what exactly is densification?

Densification simply describes the goal or end state of supporting more capacity within the same area or footprint. It is borne from the need of network providers to not only keep up with the increase in bandwidth demand they are seeing, but also grow their competitive edge in delivering a better end user experience for their customers.

Cable or Multi-Service Operators (MSOs) are undergoing a multi-year upgrade of their Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) access infrastructure. To provide a better quality of experience to subscribers, they are delivering higher capacity to smaller groups of homes and pushing fiber closer to the edge of the network.

HFC Fiber nodes, which on average service 500 homes per node, are being replaced with 10 to 12 Digital Fiber nodes. These nodes will now service 40 to 64 homes, be pushed deeper into the access, and increase per-user capacity.

An incredible amount of digital fiber nodes are expected to be deployed in the next few years, from tens to hundreds of thousands globally in 2018 and 2019. Fiber densification, the ability to pack as much capacity as possible over the limited fiber resources available, is of critical importance to achieve business objectives.

Finally, the simplest example of fiber densification is the hyperscale data center interconnect application. Global content providers are deploying huge amounts of fiber between massive data centers to maintain their aggressive pace of innovation and keep up with the doubling of bandwidth they are seeing on a yearly basis. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on November 20, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By John Hawkins – 100G. One hundred billion bits per second. Let that sink in for a minute.

You may have seen broadband offers from your local phone, cable, or wireless operator for 1 Gb/s services. But 100 Gb/s? Nice as it sounds, who needs it? Well, you’d be surprised.

As it turns out, 100GbE service is in demand for several reasons. Not in your residential context, mind you, but in a growing number of enterprise and operator scenarios – and it’s starting to get noticed. Current industry projections estimate that almost $7B (US) worth of 100G Ethernet services will sell this year, and will approach $20B by 2020.

We have been experiencing continued growth in bandwidth consumption for years. No surprise there. Shipments for 1GbE ports are still the sweet spot and the volume leader, while 10GbE ports are gaining ground according to Ovum. The trend is driven primarily by the growth in enterprise/residential service aggregation, mobile network buildouts, and data center interconnect. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on October 6, 2017 by | Leave a comment

Optic Zoo Networks Keeps Vancouver’s Data Traveling at Blistering Speeds with Ciena

By Tony Ross – Optic Zoo Networks is a recognized brand throughout metro Vancouver due to our extensive carrier grade dark fiber network and infrastructure. Based on demand and to further accelerate our growth and better serve Tier 1 service providers, we knew it was time to take our offerings to the next level.

Our customers need to support bandwidth-hogging applications like virtual and augmented reality, as well as Internet of Things (IoT). However, in order for data to continue to flow with ease, we needed to ensure that Optic Zoo Networks was ready to support that growth. That meant offering new Carrier Ethernet Services (CES), and in turn, required that we build a Carrier Ethernet Network (CEN).

To continue to support top-echelon service providers, however, we needed to build a CEN that could scale instantaneously and meet the needs of organizations in a range of industries – from finance, healthcare, education, and more.

For example, customers that previously wanted to upgrade to higher levels of bandwidth had to go through inefficient processes, such as having to order a network loop that could take weeks. With our CEN, today’s 1G customers can easily upgrade to 10G tomorrow with a simple software upgrade. more> https://goo.gl/fh54t3

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