Centre of attention
2 February 2021
The rise of the data centre has arguably driven much of the demand for greater bandwidth and higher data rates. What does it mean for the components market?
Data Centre Optics
The economics of port breakout
11 August 2017
Port-breakout deployments have become a popular networking tool and are driving the large industry demand for parallel optics transceivers. Today, port breakout is commonly used to operate 40G/100G parallel optics transceivers as four 10G/25G links. Breaking out parallel ports is beneficial for multiple applications, such as building large scale spine-and-leaf networks and enabling today’s high-density 10/25G networks. The latter task is the focus of this article.
On-board optics: beyond pluggables
3 October 2016
The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) is looking to change networking equipment permanently. Andy Extance finds out why
Super-sizing the data centre
17 March 2016
Warehouse-scale data centres are stretching the limits of current networking technologies. Dr Ioannis Tomkos describes how advanced optics can remove performance bottlenecks to enable the data centres of the future
Taking multimode fibre to new wavelengths
24 September 2015
Vendors are developing products that support wavelength multiplexing over multimode fibre, providing an alternative to parallel links. Robert Roe reports
The long and the short of it
10 September 2014
Architects of the largest data centres have set optical engineers a challenge: to create cheaper 100 Gigabit interfaces that span up to 2km. Roy Rubenstein reports
Events
Latest issue
As the pandemic underlines the value of the internet more than ever, its underlying technology is making one of its biggest transitions for years.
The data centre market is a particularly wide-ranging one, with one of the driving forces in recent years the emergence of the hyperscale data centre or cloud service provider.
As the world struggles to settle into the ‘new normal’, today’s optical networks need to be flexible in their architecture blueprint, while adapting to new technologies to provide the kinds of new capacity and service options to meet accelerated demand for higher bandwidth.
To address the undeniable growing demand for higher bandwidth, optical vendors have been playing their role with the development of various coherent optical transceivers for different areas of the market, each with its own set of design considerations.
The demand for bandwidth has unarguably skyrocketed in recent years, thanks largely to the increased appetite for online gaming, content streaming and social-media use.
The importance of reliable connectivity has never been more recognised than it is now. While ambitious targets have been in place across the world for fibre deployment for some time, the ongoing pandemic has served to push it to the forefront.
Looking into the future of telecommunications, it could be argued that AI and telcos will effectively transform each other, explains Raf Meersman
How do we, as an industry, build better broadband for a post-pandemic world? The answer could be fixed, suggests Stefaan Vanhastel
Altnets could be the key to connecting rural areas in 2021, argues Michael Armitage
A glance at the current market for fifth-generation coherent optics, and some of the latest developments available
