Often attention is focused on the penetration of fibre closer to the subscriber; however, it is important to not lose sight of how the global demand for data-rich applications also impacts further upstream in the long-haul section of the network. Links between cities must support the ever-increasing volume of data traffic to ensure that transmission bottlenecks do not occur. 

Increases in per-channel data rates up to 400G are grabbing headlines and fibre makers must continue to innovate to allow such speeds to be installed efficiently.

The year 2014 marked a milestone for fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in Latin America. As a result of significant expansion to their fibre networks, several countries in the region, notably Brazil and Uruguay, can now claim to be among the world leaders in terms of FTTH deployment.

At a time when internet giants are demanding faster and cheaper optical networking products for their data centres, silicon photonics has yet to deliver. At this year’s Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) in Los Angeles, Facebook network architect, Yuval Bachar, again called for optical links priced at $1 per gigabit running over singlemode fibre. Yet commercial development of silicon photonics products isn’t progressing fast enough to keep up with the industry’s desires.

Metro, regional, long-haul, metro-access, metro-aggregation, metro-core, ultra-long-haul, data centre interconnect… whatever these terms mean to you, I can almost guarantee that we would disagree somewhere in our views of exactly what these terms mean and where specifically these products are used in optical networks. Our expectations of exactly what distances these systems would cover and the functionality that each should have would probably also vary considerably. 

Given that the term web-scale was coined barely two years ago, it is surprising how quickly it has come to dominate the conversation in the optical networking industry. The requirements of web-scale operators like Facebook, Google and Microsoft are increasingly front and centre at events like OFC 2015, which was held in Los Angeles, California, in March.

Last year, AFL celebrated its 30th birthday. The company has come a long way since 1984 when Alcoa, formerly the Aluminum Company of America, joined forces with Fujikura of Japan to form Alcoa Fujikura Ltd., better known today as AFL.