OFC/NFOEC N55

OFC/NFOEC: first signs of life. The industry was happy with good news last week from consultancy firms Dell’Oro and RHK on the optical system market (Telcoflash N54), but also the optical component business is starting to get busy too. Hot topics were FTTx/PON, 40 Gbit/s optics, 10 Gbit/s and ROADMs. The 40 Gbit/s OC768 is just emerging after years of hype broken by the telecom downturn. First orders are there (DT, and probably MCI), with vendors very active in this market (Marconi and CoreOptics, Fujitsu, Cisco, Mintera Corp., Photline, StrataLight, Cernet,…). In the 10 Gbit/s market, the XFP module performance is still a hot topic, and talks are about (small) size and (low) power consumption. ADI, Bookham, Emcore, AMCC, T-Networks, OCP, are among the most active. The third most important topic is the wavelength selective switch (WSS) to be used in ROADMs, offering more flexibility. As the ROADMs market is forecast to take-off, WSS is also seen as a promising market.

Passive optical networking (PON) components have not taken off up to now because of cost and consequently lack of demand. With recent FTTx deployments in Japan and the US (Verizon and SBC), there is a chance that diplexer and splitter costs will go down.