Active Insight

Hosted in Dublin this year, ECOC 2019 offered three days of interaction with primarily component companies. Equipment and service provider attendance was minimal, although a handful did make the trip to the component-centric show.

Optical hardware spending has been declining in North America since 2015. In this report, we examine the question of whether North America’s decline in overall optical spending signifies a long-term trend and whether EMEA and the rest of the world will follow this same trend.

Andrew Schmitt gave a presentation on July 30th, 2019 during the Optical Internetworking Forum quarterly meeting. He was asked to give a brief overview of emerging pluggable coherent technologies and the opportunity this new market presents.

Acacia is a transformational acquisition that can vault Cisco into a market leadership position as the world transitions to disaggregated network design and pluggable, interoperable coherent optics.

Cignal AI attended the 2019 International Telecoms Week (ITW) in Atlanta June 24-26. ITW is a trade show focused on the wholesale telecommunications market and is attended primarily by network…

The Next Generation Optical Networks trade show (NGON) was in Nice, France May 21-23, and Cignal AI was in attendance.

Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst for Optical Hardware, recently moderated a discussion on “Disaggregation Strategies & Transport SDN” in advance of the NGON & DCI World conference in Nice. Scott…

5G mobile technology and the cable/MSO initiative Fiber Deep are generating interest in new and unique optical networking solutions

The next major stop on the road to faster speeds in the datacenter is 400Gbps Ethernet, and activity at OFC2019 centered on making this speed a feasible commercial option.

Open and disaggregated network equipment, software, and standards were a common theme on the floor and in presentations at OFC this year.

The compact modular format continues to be the fastest growing segment of the optical hardware market. In this section, the announcements and demonstrations at OFC are detailed.

Coherent announcements and roadmaps at the show focused on two themes: lowering the power of coherent technology for use in pluggable applications and increasing baud rates to raise the maximum capacity of a single wavelength beyond 600Gbps. And despite few new ROADM announcements, there was a spirited debate about future ROADM architectures.

Scott Wilkinson and Andrew Schmitt gave presentations about 5G and 400ZR during the OFC2019 Marketwatch program. Download a copy of their slides.

Despite early claims that the optical network must be upgraded to realize the capabilities of 5G, network operators are instead building the radio network first and updating the optical network only when needed.

The 2019 Optical Fiber Conference is less than a month away. Cignal AI’s analysts have compiled a list of predictions and expectations for what we expect to see from vendors and other OFC participants.

Despite early claims that the optical network must be upgraded to realize the capabilities of 5G, network operators are instead building the radio network first and updating the optical network only when needed.

This report examines trends in coherent port pricing from multiple vendors and for the industry overall.

The arrival of standardized, pluggable 400ZR and derivative technologies – fourth generation coherent – is poised to be the most disruptive event in optical hardware since the advent of coherent 100G in 2010.

The SCTE Cable-Tec Expo is the premiere technical trade show for North American Cable MSOs and has historically been oriented towards software, analog hardware, outside plant, and HFC-specific equipment. This year a greater number of prominent optical companies joined in. Factor such as fiber deep, native optics, 5G, and virtualization are driving optical deployments into the MSOs.

Infinera’s acquisition of Coriant officially closed on October 1, 2018, and it is yet another example of the absorption of smaller optical networking equipment vendors happening in the market today, although at a scale not seen since Ciena acquired the optical assets of Nortel in 2009. This Active Insight report examines the post-acquisition opportunities and challenges in depth.