The Leap Year Effect on Optical Networking
By Pravin Mahajan
Director of Product and Corporate Marketing
Silicon Valley celebrated a milestone last month, hosting the most watched online event in the country’s history. Super Bowl 50 broke all records. According to CBS, 3.96 million unique viewers tuned in to watch the event via connected devices, setting a new Super Bowl streaming record. This compares to Super Bowl 49, when 1.3 million people watched online. Average viewers per minute for Super Bowl 50 nearly doubled that of Super Bowl 49, 1.4 million compared to 800 million. And, during Super Bowl 50, the total volume of network data transmitted was more than double as compared to Super Bowl 49.
By 2020, the Internet of Things (IOT) is expected grow dramatically, with over 21 billion devices becoming connected and sending a range of data from small telemetry packets to streaming video. Over 70 percent of businesses are expected to be cloud-enabled in four years, moving more applications and data to public, private and hybrid cloud environments. All these developments mean that bandwidth requirements in transport networks will continue to grow exponentially.
For these reasons and many others, the United Nations nominated 2015 as the International Year of Light to bring attention to the importance of photonics. In this year of light we have seen many moves in the optical networking industry confirming the importance of photonic integration for transport networks: component vendors are being acquired by systems manufacturers who understand the importance of vertical integration and silicon photonic techniques are being explored by companies for short reach data center applications.
For more than a decade, Infinera has redefined optical transport networks, first in 2005 by pioneering long-haul and subsea platforms based on large-scale photonic integration using Indium Phosphide (InP) chipsets. In 2011, Infinera advanced transport networks to the next level with the introduction of the DTN-X Family, powered by the 500 gigabit per second (500G) InP photonic integrated circuit (PIC). In 2014, Infinera introduced and started shipping the industry’s first purpose built platform for data center interconnect, the Cloud Xpress. And in 2015, Infinera introduced a complement to Cloud Xpress, the
XT-500, to deliver longer reach data center interconnect, up to 4,000 kilometers (km), with the same high density and low power. To date, customers have lit over two million fiber route kilometers using InP technology, validating its success.
As bandwidth requirements climbed, it quickly became apparent that network operators needed to rapidly scale optical networks in order to match the expense associated with business imperatives to end-customer revenue. Infinera Instant Bandwidth, introduced in 2012, allows operators to pre-deploy 500G network capacity and activate 100G increments when needed, with just few clicks of a mouse. Photonic integrated circuit technology and software innovation facilitated this new model, enabling operators to create latent pools of service-ready bandwidth in networks. This was exemplified in 2015 when Australia Japan Cable, a subsea operator, utilized Time-based Instant Bandwidth (a variant of Instant Bandwidth) to quickly restore network services during a major subsea cable fault.
Infinera innovates not only in the photonic domain but also in the area of electronics and coherent algorithms. Earlier this year, Infinera announced the Advanced Coherent Toolkit (ACT) to improve capacity-reach performance by 40-60 percent for long-haul networks, including subsea applications. Telstra trialed ACT on their production submarine cable (Endeavour) running 9,000 km from Sydney to Hawaii, validating the benefits of next -generation coherent processing.
Clearly new innovations are required to scale networks to meet the seemingly infinite increase in bandwidth demand, making 2016 an ideal year to leap ahead of the current generation of optical technologies.
Infinera invites you to visit us at OFC 2016 to discuss the next generation of terabit optical transport. We will be at the event in a significant way, speaking on more than 10 thought leadership topics, hosting private customer meetings and demonstrating our state-of-the-art Intelligent Transport Networks on the show floor in our North America mobile demo unit – the Infinera Express.
For more information or to request a meeting at OFC (booth #1375), click here. We hope to see you there!
Related links:
- Web page: Infinera’s presence at OFC
- Web page: Intelligent Transport Networks
- OSA Webinar recording: Light on a Chip
- White paper: Photonic Integration