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>
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.
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?
By John Hawkins – 100G. One hundred billion bits per second. Let that sink in for a minute.
By Tony Ross – 
By Bruce Watson – The company that would eventually become Ciena 
By Bo Gowan – To fully appreciate the impact that coherent optical technology has had on the telecom industry, you need to understand the barriers that optical vendors ran into as they looked to develop the next step in transport past 10G ‘e2’80ldblquote and that story begins back in the go-go dot.com days of the late 1990s.par
In 2001, the huge optical boom came to a crashing end. Network operators had drastically overbuilt global fiber capacity during the dot.com bubble, and it would be years before spending on optical transport equipment would fully rebound. The demands coming from network operators changed in an instant for optical equipment vendors.par
What the team produced was not so much of a single change in optical transmission but an entire series of new optical transport concepts and inventions that together enabled what we know today as coherent optical transport.par
IBM – IBM (
“Reaching the one trillion bit per second mark with the Holey Optochip marks IBM’s latest milestone to develop chip-scale transceivers that can handle the volume of traffic in the era of 
