Gazettabyte authored a detailed article about the sampling of the first 400G DSP for use in pluggable applications and the potential impact on the market. It included an interview with Inphi, Neophotonics, and analysts including Andrew Schmitt.
“If you look at the reasons why IP-over-DWDM – coloured optics directly on routers – failed, all of those reasons have changed,” says Schmitt. The industry is moving to open line systems, open network management, and more modular network design.
“All of the traffic is IP and layer-1 switching and grooming isn’t just unnecessary, it is more expensive than low-feature layer-2 switching,” says Schmitt, adding that operators will use pluggables wherever the lower performance is acceptable. Moreover, this performance gap will narrow with time.
Schmitt argues that ZR+ should be interoperable, just like 400ZR. “I think NEL, Acacia, and Inphi should have an offsite and figure this out,” he says. “These three companies are in a position to nail down the specs and create a large, disruptive coherent pluggable market.”