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.
