Cisco

400ZRx Pluggable shipments surge while lower cloud spending holds back Compact Modular in North America.

Key technology takeaways from OFC 2022.

Fourth-quarter 2021 worldwide optical hardware spending increased 3.5% YoY. Declines centered in APAC for the second consecutive quarter, while all other regions grew YoY.

Here is a sneak peek of the hot topics of discussion at OFC 2022

Cloud operator and traditional telco spending leads rebound in North America

Compact Modular equipment sales continued to surge while Chinese coherent port shipments stalled.

Initial Optical Components report, in Beta – for access to the report, please contact [email protected].

Optical forecasts were reduced by $1.1B worldwide in 2025 due to a shift of coherent optics into router-based DCO’s.

The historical classification of coherent optical technology (Gen1, Gen2, etc.) is no longer sufficient. Therefore, Cignal AI will now recognize and classify coherent DSP technology by its maximum baud rate and whether the DSP is optimized for Performance or Compact applications.

Compact modular sales again outperformed the overall optical hardware market while Packet-OTN sales declined. 400ZR is shipping but is supply limited.

Development moves past 90+ GBaud directly to 120+

Mentioned: Scott Wilkinson on Acacia’s new product announcement

Optical spending by North American Traditional Telco carriers declined YoY; Cloud & Colo optical spending worldwide slowed as NA spending stalled.

First-quarter 2021 worldwide optical hardware spending was down slightly YoY, Chinese optical hardware spending was down significantly.

It was a big quarter for 600G coherent port shipments and sales to Cloud Operators.

Nearly 5 years after the project’s inception, AT&T disclosed it has deployed OpenROADM-based networks across a dozen US metros.

After years of anticipation, 400G pluggable digital coherent optics (DCO) will finally achieve general availability and initial deployment in 2021.

400Gbps+ port shipments doubled YoY, 400ZR ports started to ship, and compact modular sales significantly outperformed the overall optical hardware market this quarter.

Several vendors are shipping 800Gbps capable coherent optical solutions, and now the industry must consider the next steps in development.

Co-packaged optics (CPO) moved from hero experiments to discussions of commercial roadmaps this year. In this update from OFC21, we cover the key points about CPO discussed at the show.