There’s no denying that the last two decades have seen demand for bandwidth increasing – something that has provided much opportunity for growth for the networking market, but also presented it with some major challenges.

There has never been a better time to be in optical communications. Major communication trends impact everyone’s lives, such as UHD video, cloud services, big data and the move of mobile internet from LTE to 5G. They all reflect themselves in an evolving optical networking architecture and paradigm changes of how and where to use optical gear.

With 5G promising enhanced speeds, new services and new revenue-generating opportunities for service providers, the industry is in a race to unleash the 5G era.

Cloud data centres bring valuable services that many of us are progressively accepting into our daily lives – and in doing so, push optical communication’s limits. ‘The premier league cloud data centres have this tremendous appetite for more bandwidth,’ comments Andy Bechtolsheim, chief development officer at Arista Networks in Santa Clara, US. They expect their bandwidth needs to double every two years or so, he says.