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>
By Brian Lavallée – Submarine networks carry over 99% of all telecommunications traffic between continental landmasses making them easily classified as 
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 
