The Show Must Go On: OptiNet China
By Lisa Crewe | Posted on August 28, 2020
While COVID has put a clamp on most global travel now-a-days, that did not stop Acacia from virtually participating in OptiNet China this week in Beijing. Our very own Fenghai Liu, Associate Vice President, Product Line Management at Acacia, presented online on the second day of the conference. His talk focused on “Coherent Solutions Evolving Towards Edge and Access Applications.”
This year’s OptiNet China Conference featured dedicated forums for data center interconnects, next-generation optical transport networks, FTTH and 5G. The conference program was designed to address the most significant innovations and issues facing optical network operators and the industry. Given the conference’s focus, it was the perfect place to discuss how the time is now right for coherent optics to take the next step and migrate to edge and access networks, particularly in view of the emergence of 5G and edge computing.
The Evolution of Coherent in Edge and Access
We believe coherent technology for fiber optical communications has reached a tipping point with a new generation of pluggable modules based on 7nm CMOS technology. Much progress has been made over the past decade to reduce the size, power consumption and cost of coherent solutions to enable the transition of use from long-haul to metro networks. Acacia has developed advance packaging technology, which we call 3D Siliconization, that allows the high-speed optics to be produced using volume electronics manufacturing processes. This can enable scalable and operationally flexible solutions to address service providers’ growing bandwidth demands and has the potential to open up new addressable markets for coherent solutions in the Edge and Access networks including 5G wireless and cable.
In his talk, Fenghai discussed how coherent is addressing these new markets to address growing bandwidth demands. Acacia is enabling these applications with its recently announced product offering: 100G coherent pluggable solutions specifically designed for optimization in edge and access applications with unamplified links up to 120km.
Introducing Acacia’s 100G Point-to-Point (P2P) Edge and Access Solutions
Acacia has a history of driving coherent into new market applications by delivering the technology, scalability, feature set, and innovation designed to meet service provider needs to maintain and grow their networks over time. With our newly announced 100G coherent P2P solutions, we have leveraged our 10 years of high-performance coherent transmission expertise to specifically address edge and access applications in terms of form factor, power consumption and cost. Offered in a QSFP-DD form factor widely used for client-optics, Acacia’s new 100G coherent point-to-point (P2P) edge and access solutions are designed to provide network operators the ability to scale to higher data rates to meet growing bandwidth demands over some of the most challenging optical links, while also providing operational simplicity that may lead to overall network savings.
Compared to alternative direct-detect solutions, coherent P2P solutions are extremely tolerant to fiber types, chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion (PMD), and back reflections, which simplifies operational deployment. Edge and access networks, particularly those offering 5G wireless and enterprise services, can benefit from coherent technology because it has ample optical margins designed to handle the condition and reaches of the access fiber plant resulting in shorter provisioning times. Coherent P2P solutions are user friendly in deployment and provisioning due to low laser emission, wide tolerance range and rich monitoring and diagnostic features.
To learn more about Acacia’s edge and access solutions, refer to our product page at this link. If you have questions or would like to learn more, click here to set up a meeting.