Low to Mid Range DWDM Platforms

Fri Oct 6 14:07:53 UTC 2023

On 10/6/23 15:53, Dave Cohen wrote:

> My experience is primarily with the traditional carrier-grade folks 
> like Ciena, Infinera, etc. but over the last decade all of those 
> vendors have focused on improving how they scale down without 
> sacrificing (most of the) quality and functionality - to varying 
> degrees of success. There are also some more recent entrants that 
> built their products to target the DCI market but rather than focusing 
> on bandwidth density have focused on cost per bit for a mid-range 
> solution. There are almost definitely multiple quality options out 
> there without having to buy the full 88 channel n-degree ROADM Ciena 
> 6500 that takes up a full rack - although given the stated 
> requirements, there may not be a one-size-fits-all solution that's 
> ideal for all of the OP's projects.

There are two markets driving the major vendors right now - DCI and subsea.

The regular longhaul terrestrial gear is mostly the same, bar for 
upgrades to the latest CMOS. For these vendors, the same gear is also 
re-used for their subsea solutions, although with "submarine" versions 
of their terrestrial line cards.

Adva's TeraFlex is a bit different in that it is optimized both for DCI 
and longhaul terrestrial. We are currently looking at it for a 700km 
deployment in one of our markets. Very impressive!

Another entrant into the market is Acacia, now known as the Cisco 
NCS1000. They also use the same platform for both terrestrial and subsea:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/optical-networking/network-convergence-system-1000-series/index.html

Mark.