Infinera and Sumitomo Electric said they have demonstrated point-to-multipoint pluggable transceiver technology that uses coherent XR optics.
Coherent optics can deliver more data in comparison with traditional optical communications based on ones and zeros. Until now it has only been used in point-to-point configurations.
XR optics can address “the challenges of misalignment between network traffic patterns and the technology used to move that traffic at the optical layer,” according to an Infinera press release. This is an important topic as traffic demand proliferates from 5G, broadband, the cloud and data center interconnects.
Solving this problem could result in a cost of ownership savings of as much as 70% while simplifying networks and increasing flexibility, according to Infinera.
“We have taken a big step toward optical network innovation by collaborating with Infinera on its XR optics technology, which enables point-to-multipoint network topology,” Kazutaka Kawamoto, the General Manager of Sumitomo Electric Information Network R & D Center, said in the press release. “We look forward to this partnership leading to successes from the access to the core of the network for service providers.”
The tests, which were conducted in Japan, were run over single-fiber PON infrastructure, featured Infinera’s ICE-X 100G and 400G coherent pluggable transceivers and were hosted in the Sumitomo Electric’s FTU 9100 metro/access aggregation switch.
The companies say that the test successfully demonstrated several capabilities. These included high-speed business services over existing single-fiber PON infrastructure, simplified network aggregation for emerging services and applications such as 5G and edge computing, and efficient point-to-multipoint metro traffic transmission over existing optical line systems.
The two companies are members of the Open XR Forum. The goal is to accelerate the adoption of intelligent coherent point-to-multipoint network architectures and drive standardization of networking interfaces to support multi-vendor interoperability and an open and multisource ecosystem.
Sumitomo and Infinera are not the only companies looking to use coherent optics for point-to-multipoint applications. Earlier this month, CableLabs issued the architecture specification for coherent PON (CPON), which would also use a point-to-multipoint approach.
Seventeen vendors are participating in the CableLabs CPON working group.
