OFC/NFOEC 2010 came to a close last week.  The 2010 conference was a resounding success.  Conference organizers released the following statement after the show:

At OFC/NFOEC 2010, innovation and optimism in the industry were some of the key themes resonating with attendees and exhibitors. Technical presentations featured the latest breakthroughs in the drive for more capacity, as data transmission rates of more than 69 Tbits/s were reported, along with other key developments in wireless backhaul, datacom, passive optical networks, nonlinear fiber devices and much more.

On the show floor, companies from the systems, carrier and components sectors added an enhanced level of interest with mobile trailers, industry-first announcements and demos of 100G deployment, as the industry moves forward from 10G and 40G into a 100G reality. New this year, the Fiber Optic Switch and Technology Center featured two days of sessions exploring how advanced fiber connectivity and automated switching can help in provisioning, testing and monitoring various network architectures. Also new, the Optical Internetworking Forum presented a program on the building blocks for highly intelligent, reliable, interoperable networks, including insights into 100G, control plane and on-demand carrier services. At OFC/NFOEC’s Market Watch and Service Provider Summit events, industry leaders presented on the state of the optical industry, photonic integration, wireless backhaul, carrier networks, super data centers and FTTx.

A series of events honoring Nobel Prize winner Charles Kao took place this year, after the 2010 conference was dedicated to the “Father of Fiber Optics.” More than 40 years ago, Kao discovered a way to make light travel long distances down a glass fiber, spawning what would become a whole new field—optical fiber communication.

As a promising indicator that the industry is rebounding, attendance at OFC/NFOEC increased this year to 9,700 attendees. The more than 500 participating companies overwhelmingly reported strong leads and renewed interest from customers across the three exhibition days maintaining the show’s standing as the world’s largest optical communication event. Attendees were also treated to more than 700 technical presentations from leading research groups across the globe.

Next year, OFC/NFOEC moves north to Los Angeles, California. Mark your calendars for March 6 – 10, 2011 for what will continue to be the largest worldwide venue for doing business with the most important companies in the industry and for announcing the most cutting-edge optical communication research.

There’s no doubt about it now – OFC/NFOEC is well underway with the one of the busiest days of the conference today.  The day kicked off with the Plenary and Awards Session this morning, honoring several industry pioneers for their achievements in optical fiber communication.  Tingye Li then provided a dedication address to Charles Kao, who was in attendance today with his wife Gwen, and to whom the 2010 conference has been dedicated.

Next up were three distinguished keynote speakers.  Philippe Keryer, VP at Alcatel-Lucent and president of their Carrier Product Group, discussed the challenges, transformations and innovations of global broadband networks and what Alcatel-Lucent is doing to make sure they can increase revenue, decrease cost and improve eco-sustainability in this area.  SEACOM’s CEO Brian Herlihy took the stage next to discuss his company’s efforts in providing broadband to East Africa.  The undersea fiber optic network went online last July and since then demand for broadband in Africa has skyrocketed by 1000%, Herlihy said.  He went on to outline the socio-economic, socio-political and environmental challenges his company continues to face as they work to connect the continent.  He noted SEACOM’s entire success is based on cost reduction – a theme that continues to come up throughout the conference.  Lastly, Hideo Miyahara of NICT in Japan gave an interesting perspective on bio-inspired network controls.  He is researching ways to borrow mechanisms of self-organization and autonomy found in biological systems and applying the ideas to control communications networks.  One example he provided involved mimicking the way a group of fireflies flashes their lights and applying that mechanism to waveform synchronized data gathering.

After the plenary session, attendees got their first glimpse of the OFC/NFOEC show floor in the exhibit hall, which opened today.  More than 500 companies are showcasing their products and services, with plenty of new offerings for attendees this year.  More information on show floor highlights is available here.

Of course the technical sessions are going strong today as well.  Post-deadline papers were announced today, so be sure to tack those on to your agenda for tomorrow.  More on those in a future blog update.

Lastly – be sure to find some time to unwind tonight at the Conference Reception from 6:30 – 8:00 in the Sails Pavilion of the convention center. 

OFC/NFOEC officially kicked off yesterday, with programming in short courses and workshops already underway.  Short courses and workshops are continuing through today.  This year’s courses run the gamut in all technical categories of the conference.

Some conference highlights for today, Monday, March 22, include:

• The first day of the Special Symposium Beyond Telecom and Datacom: Optical Interconnects for the Computercom Era
  
  This symposium will frame the Computercom interconnect challenge from several viewpoints. Speakers from system companies will detail the requirements of optical links for future systems. The symposium features 19 technical presentations spread across four sessions on Monday and Tuesday.
  
• The second day of several in-depth workshops – on topics including all-optical networks, FTTH, cloud computing and more.  A few examples include:
  
  OMA, 1 TbE Transport – Why, When and How? Andrew Ellis¹, Seb Savory²; ¹Tyndall Natl. Inst., Ireland, ²Univ. College London, UK,
  Given the rapid growth of Internet traffic it is predicted in some quarters that in the near future we will need transport systems with capacities approaching 1 Tb/s. This workshop will examine the motivation behind such predictions and discuss the potential requirements for transponders offering such capacities.
  
  OMD, Is All-Optical Processing Green? Javier Marti¹, Keith Williams²; ¹Univ. Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, ²NRL, USA, The workshop addresses relevant key notes and further discussion on how AOP compares to all electrical processing and to hybrid opto-electronic processing in terms of power consumption efficiency.
  
  NMA, Network Technologies for Large Data Centers, Cedric Lam; Google Inc., USA, Cloud computing has become a growing trend in future Internet communities. This workshop provides an interactive forum for technologists and data center operators to exchange ideas on requirements and innovations for data center network connections.
  
• Morning Technical Briefings - Join the OFC/NFOEC Subcommittee Chairs and get a general overview of the day’s technical sessions, which begin in full force  this afternoon.

Coming up tomorrow:
Plenary Session
Exhibit Hall Opens
Market Watch Opening Day

As OFC/NFOEC approaches once again, I find myself reflecting upon the state of optical communications.  Certainly, there is much to be enthusiastic about.  The never-ending bandwidth explosion shows no signs of slowing, thus creating widespread demand across all optical industries, from 100GE for the core, pluggable optics for interconnect, and PON components for FTTx, to name just a few.  And there is no better place than OFC/NFOEC to get a read on the status of these important optical technologies.  While I would be foolish to make any predictions here, given the unpredictable nature of technology, there are certainly things I expect to see in technical sessions, on the show floor, and even in poster sessions.

I am confident there will be no shortage of 100GE demos.  This latest speed step for Ethernet is currently in the implementation phase, so the show will serve as a much needed venue for vendors to show their wares.  I am also certain vendors will be demonstrating pluggable optics of all flavors and varieties, with the buzz likely to be around CFP and CXP modules, both able to handle over 100G of traffic.  The CFP is predominantly a 100GE focused product, while the CXP appears to be targeted for Fibre Channel and Infiniband applications.  I also expect to see PON everywhere, just as it has been the last few years.  Certainly, PON continues to be a hot topic, and the leading protocols have been busy bumping up their data-rates, while leading vendors have been working on lowering component costs.

Never before (not even pre-bubble) have I seen this level of optimism.  There is a sense that now is the time for optics to really grab the opportunities that are available.  If everyone can just work together as an industry, and properly define the protocols and interfaces with a close eye on cost, perhaps glass will one day be better known for communications than windows and glassware.

Jim Theodoras
Director of Technical Marketing
ADVA Optical Networking

Editor's Note: View Jim's full OFC/NFOEC technical preview on the ADVA Optical Networking blog.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Charles Kao last autumn was very stimulating to many of us.  Over the years, some of the pioneers in the field have told us “youngsters” war stories about the early days.  These stories conveyed some of the uncertainty and the excitement of the times.  The awarding of the prize brought these stories into focus and convinced us that maybe these pioneers were telling the truth.  They continually remind us that before the birth of optical communications, the problem gripping the telecommunications industry was one quite familiar to us today: “How in the world can we satiate the enormous thirst for more bandwidth?”  Most effort was directed toward highly overmoded metallic waveguides for millimeter wavelengths.  The solutions were expensive and were extremely elegant, but also clumsy.  Charles Kao and a relatively small number of other workers were looking into using optical frequencies for communications.  Once optical communications appeared to be practical, a massive retooling occurred and we have scarcely looked back.

But we will look back during the Charles Kao Symposium at OFC/NFOEC.  David Payne will preside and hopefully will show a movie or two from the early days.  Gwen Kao will talk about personal and technical aspects of the work of her husband.  It took ingenuity to make optical fiber a communications reality.  We will hear from three of the pioneers in this effort, Tadashi Miyashita, Peter Schultz and John MacChesney.  History emphasizes the glorious, so it will be interesting to see if they mention the fires, explosions and other setbacks.  New fiber begat new systems and new systems begat new fiber design.  Andy Chraplyvy will show this to us in a whirlwind tour of the intertwining histories of system and fiber evolution.  When the dust settles and David Payne closes the symposium, I hope to be left with an appreciation of the past, hope for the future and a warm feeling of camaraderie between all of us.  If the talks do not do the trick, perhaps the reception following them will.

Bob Jopson
OFC/NFOEC 2010 Technical Program Co-Chair

Plenary Session
The plenary session for OFC/NFOEC includes three speakers who will address recent developments and future challenges in optical fiber communications.  One of the speakers is Dr. Hideo Miyahara, president of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan.  NICT conducts research and development on topics that include the architectural and elemental technologies for next-generation optical networks.  Dr. Miyahara will describe the future role of information and communication technologies in society and the challenges faced in developing next-generation networks.

Technical Hot Topics
In the technical program at OFC/NFOEC, one of the hot topics for 2010 is spectral efficiency.  This is being looked at in terms of multi-level modulation formats, coherent systems and the signal-processing algorithms that are needed for such systems, as well as device technology, including the development of photonic integrated circuits for coherent systems.  The use of digital signal processing in transmitters and receivers has dramatically enriched the field, and many exciting results will be presented at the conference.

Charles Kao Dedication
This year, OFC/NFOEC provides attendees with an incredibly unique opportunity to hear the latest advances in research, development and engineering for optical fiber communications and to take a step back in time and hear about the early days of optical fiber communications at the Charles Kao Symposium.  The Technical Program Chairs have put together a wonderful program to honor Charles Kao that includes presentations by Gwen Kao and individuals who made pioneering contributions to the development of the first practical optical fibers.  Interestingly, 2010 is the 40th anniversary of the first low-loss optical fiber reported by Corning Glass Works.

See you in San Diego,
John Cartledge
OFC/NFOEC 2010 General Co-Chair

Demand is growing fast in optical communications. Video is the #1 driver for bandwidth, with YouTube alone using as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet did in 2000. Companies like Netflix, Amazon and Wal-Mart are offering feature-length movies for download, driving demand for fiber-to-the-home. Plus, high-definition video is fast becoming the state-of-the-art, with one high-definition movie taking up as much bandwidth as 35,000 Web pages, according to the Fiber-to-the-Home Council. Also, 25% of Americans recently said they watched a short video on their phone, according to Solutions Research Group.

Clearly, wireless communications are also increasing rapidly, especially data services such as those offered on the iPhone and other smart phone devices. The more wireless data usage, the higher bandwidth is needed in the core network, which drives optical deployment. This is what is happening now with 3G deployment. 

Carriers need to "spend" to upgrade backhaul and core network to support the explosion in wireless data/video usage. Today the mainstream is 10G, but 40G is being deployed and will take over 10G. 100G will be deployed next year, and the industry has even begun to talk about 400G!  The key is to cram in more info per bit per wavelength based on advanced modulation techniques.

Loi Nguyen
Vice President Networking, Communications and Multi-Market Products
Inphi Corporation
www.inphi.com
OFC/NFOEC Booth #813

A hot topic that after several years of intense research and development is rapidly coming to fruition is the deployment of 100G transport in carrier networks.  After several 100G field trials were reported in conferences and technical literature, the first 100G system was taken into commercial service late last year in Europe, between Frankfurt and Paris.  The modulation format is based on polarization division multiplexed QPSK (i.e., 4 bits/symbol) and a coherent receiver with digital signal processing is used to provide signal recovery and mitigation of transport impairments such as chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion.  Since several major component vendors and system integrators are close to introducing 100G products, I expect that several more 100G systems will be taken into service this year.

Given the continued rapid growth of traffic due to applications such as high-speed computing, high-definition video transport and peer-to-peer networking, research has started on optical communications systems that operate at line rates of 400Gb/s or even 1 Tb/s and achieve spectral efficiencies well above the 4 bits/symbol used by current 100G transport systems.  Note that this implies that higher SNR is needed.  The need for modulation techniques with very high spectral efficiency will require the development of photonic integrated circuits (PIC) that achieve excellent performance and allow cost-efficient system integration. 

Another key development area will be the development of very high speed analog-to-digital converters that provide the needed resolution to capture every bit in the signal constellation while allowing operation at higher symbol rates.  An interesting issue is that an increase in the symbol rate to achieve transport rates above 100G would require increasing the 50 GHz ITU spacing now common in long-haul transport systems, resulting in less wavelengths per fiber and therefore a smaller increase in aggregate system capacity than might have been expected based on the increase in line rate. 

Bert Basch
NFOEC General Chair

Note from OFC/NFOEC:  100G topics will be discussed in numerous programs at the conference.  More information on 100G programming can be found in the following areas of the Web site:

• Market Watch
• Workshops and Panels
• Conference Program
• Morning Technical Briefings