We attended the #OFC18 show and found the major theme to be the emergence of 400 Gbps modules. The next most noteworthy theme, we though, was that made by a single company, Nokia, which made its PSE-3 engine announcement. Juniper also caused a buzz with the introduction of its ACX6360 router/packet optical product announcement (paired with other announcements, too). There were countless other announcements at the show that we will touch on in our reports, but these struck us a quite noteworthy.
Chris DePuy looking to the future at #OFC18
400 Gbps optical modules, generally, are expected to be ready for sampling in the next couple months, and then be ready for volume shipments in 1H19. Most every module vendor is planning to introduce DD-QSFP. A subset of the same vendors was demonstrating OSFP modules, suggesting it was less popular at this time. We recognized a sub-theme of the 400 Gbps theme was that vendors, including Cisco and Juniper were both demonstrating hardware designs that are capable of operating at 15 Watts, which appears to be the heat that will be generated for some of the 400 Gbps modules. At the time of the show, module companies reported to us that the DSPs that would power 400 Gbps modules were unavailable, and the way it was represented to us on multiple occassions was that there is no clear indication which DSP maker would introduce the first working part.
Nokia made its PSE-3 chip announcement in support of its Optical Transport product line. It was standing room only, with lots of customers involved in the presentation (not just a bunch of analysts and competitors). We were impressed with the marketing aspect of this announcement, but also with the the statement, “we have reached the economic Shannon’s limit” with the introduction of the PSE-3 engine. The implication of economic Shannon’s limit is that to achieve an even more efficient design that would asymptote even closer to the theoretical Shannon’s limit would be too costly. The company is claiming 25% improvement in capacity and reach, 70% increased network capacity, 60% reduction in power per bit. Chungwa Telecom and Facebook were live, on stage, serving as references for Nokia’s launch. We expect full fledged PSE-3 based products will be available in about 9-12 months based on discussions at the show.
Juniper announced its ACX6360 system (as well the announcement of the ACX5448 Universal Metro Router and the PTX10002 Packet Transport Router). The ACX6360 can operate as a packet optical device, and with a software update, can also operate as a router. The general idea behind the introduction of this product is it can serve in either the packet optical transport role or as a IP/MPLS router, thereby collapsing multiple networking layers into a single platform operating at speeds up to 200 Gbps. For many uses cases, it could reduce the number of boxes from two (packet optical plus router) to one (ACX6360).