Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2023 Optical Networking Predictions:
Echoes from the Pandemic and Unrelenting Capacity Demand Driving Industry Collaboration, Public Investments, and Pluggable Innovation
By Tim Doiron, Vice President, Solution Marketing, Infinera
2022 is the year that we jumped back onto airplanes and met face to face with our partners, customers, teammates, and industry colleagues. Having recently returned from a two-week trip to Japan and South Korea, I am reminded of the global scope of our networks and the human lives they touch. With so much of our focus on technology, products, and innovations, it’s still people who are at the center of what we do. We connect people and applications to the cloud and each other every single day – and it’s never been a more critical and rewarding experience. As we look forward, it’s echoes from the pandemic and network capacity demand that continues to double approximately every two years that are at the heart of my 2023 predictions.
Industry Collaboration and Market Trends Broaden Open Optical Adoption
With the separation of optical line systems from coherent transponders and pluggables, multi-vendor open optical networking will continue to accelerate and broaden in deployment in 2023. Over 50% of Infinera’s sixth-generation ICE6 800G coherent optical engines are deployed over third-party line systems. While open optical deployments have been commonplace in subsea networks and with internet content providers, such deployments have been less common in terrestrial networks and with communication service providers. However, that too is changing. Arelion, the world’s #1-ranked internet backbone provider, with over 70,000 km of fiber, recently shared its open optical networking journey and firsthand experience deploying ICE6 over an existing third-party line system in EMEA and the U.S. Others will follow.
So, why will open optical networking adoption accelerate? The answer is multifaceted. With unrelenting capacity demand growth and modest incremental revenue, it is imperative that service providers adopt new generations of optical transmission technology faster. Open optical networking enables service providers to have more choice, faster innovation, and improved economics. In addition, echoes of the pandemic’s supply chain challenges are pushing service providers toward increased optical engine diversity to reduce their risk and shorten delivery times. Industry maturity and collaboration with organizations like the Telecom Infra Project’s (TIP) Open Optical & Packet Transport (OOPT) project group are also easing adoption by driving consistency across vendor solutions with standard interfaces and data models. As an example, the TIP OOPT Mandatory Use Cases for SDN Transport subgroup recently initiated its badge evaluation process to demonstrate compliance and interoperability. Infinera’s GX G42 is among the first solutions to receive a TIP Bronze Badge for its open compliance.
Governments Open Their Wallets to Localize and Diversify Semiconductor Manufacturing
The pandemic and increased geopolitical friction have governments and vendors reevaluating their supply chains, including the source and location of critical components like semiconductors. One of the most significant responses is the U.S.’s passage of the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act. Most of the funding provides financial incentives for semiconductor companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Micro, and others to invest in American semiconductor manufacturing as well as research and development within the United States. Other governments seeking reduced risk and increased autonomy have or will soon follow suit, including the EU, Japan, South Korea, and China.
While silicon-based semiconductors and their fabrication facilities (or fabs) generally receive the media limelight, perhaps less well known is the role of optical semiconductors in powering our networks and our connectivity. Today’s coherent optical engines enable 800G per wavelength and tens of terabits per second to be transmitted over a single fiber pair in subsea, long-haul, and metro networks. Compound semiconductors like those fabricated at Infinera’s indium phosphide (InP) fab in California are critical for the creation of the high-density photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that are the optical front end of high-performance coherent optical engines. InP PICs integrate tuneable lasers, optical amplifiers, high-speed modulators and detectors, and other functions into a single thumbnail-sized chip. In 2023, look for governments to not only invest in local fabrication of single-element silicon semiconductors but also compound semiconductors like InP that are critical to the future evolution of optical engines and our transmission networks.
Innovations in Coherent Pluggables Enable New Opportunities
Modern coherent optical engine technology came to life in 2010 when optical transmission borrowed a page out of the wireless/cellular playbook and combined multi-level analog modulation with advanced digital signal processing to enable 100G per wavelength long-distance transmission. An analog optical front end and DSP-based back end remain the two fundamental building blocks of coherent optical engines today. Increasing levels of optical component integration, including PICs and smaller-geometry DSPs, have enabled us to go from multi-rack-unit sized cards drawing hundreds of watts of power to 400G QSFP-DD pluggable transceivers that fit in your hand, plug into the faceplate of many network elements, and draw less than 25 watts.
In 2023, look for three additional innovations to enable even more opportunities for coherent pluggables. First, high-performance pluggables with 0 dBm transmit power and low out-of-band noise will enable coherent pluggable transceivers to cover a richer set of use cases, including deployment in metro networks with multiple cascaded ROADMs. This increased transceiver performance will also push some pluggables beyond the 600-km metro threshold and into a portion of the long-haul network. Second, advances in intelligent pluggables management, as being defined in the 28-member Open XR Forum and in collaboration with organizations like OIF, will ease deployment complexity and enable operational support for advanced functionality like remote diagnostics, spectrum analysis, and streaming telemetry in all types of non-optical hosts, including switches and routers. Finally, a class of coherent pluggables, like Infinera’s ICE-XR with digital subcarrier technology, will enable commercial deployment of point-to-multipoint architectures, where a single high-speed (e.g., 400G) hub optic can communicate with multiple lower-speed (e.g., 100G or 25G) optics without requiring intermediate electrical aggregation – thus reducing the amount of equipment, space, and power utilized and the total cost of network ownership by up to 70% over multiple years.
In summary, 2023 will see broader adoption of open optical networking, increased government funding to localize and expand compound semiconductor fabrication, and incremental innovations in coherent pluggables that will drive broader deployment and open new opportunities. Even with a little jet lag and a kink in my back from the flight, I look forward to seeing you face to face at a trade show or customer event in 2023. Stay safe everyone.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Doiron leads the global Solution Marketing team responsible for go-to-market strategies and communication programs for Infinera’s optical networking and software automation solutions. Built upon open, disaggregated, and programmable network innovation, these solutions enable telecommunications and web-scale operators to enhance network capacity, visibility, intelligence, and automation to simplify operations and cost effectively meet capacity demands that are doubling every two years.
Tim focuses on innovative networking solutions that include coherent optical transmission, IP/MPLS routing, next-generation mobile transport, and broadband evolution with distributed access architecture (DAA) and edge computing.
Tim brings more than 25 years of networking and telecommunications experience across business and technical organizations, including roles in marketing, product management, and engineering in executive and managerial roles at vendor and service provider companies, including Coriant, Tellabs, ARRIS, Cadant, Ericsson, and AT&T Mobility. Tim is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has authored numerous articles. He holds an MBA from Webster University, an M.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Southern Illinois University. He also holds eight patents and is a member of IEEE and the Optical Society (OSA).
