Fiber – The Spice of Life?

The final quarter of the year found me back in Asia, this time visiting China and India. As always, there are several stories I’d be happy to share privately on my experience, including this time an aborted landing in Hong Kong and being trapped in a glass elevator with the hotel porter in Bangalore at 4am! The flavor for this blog post however is intended to appeal to a different palate.

There are many different things to see and experience in both India and China, but one of my personal favorites is food. Let me be more specific, spicy food! Now for a man from the land where good food is boiled, or fried or boiled then fried….you may question my taste…and you may be right, but at the risk of offending my beautiful French wife, who introduced me to the joy of food perfectly prepared and balanced with complementary accompaniments, in general not considered “spicy”…I LOVE spicy food!

It’s interesting that over 400 years ago, the East India Trading Company became one of the first organisations with a global reach. It’s value was the collection and distribution of materials and spices including perhaps the most common spice – salt. I find it tough to imagine a time when there was no access to the now ‘go to’ spices I find in my own fridge and spice rack….including, of course, something as commonplace as salt or pepper, where I’ve been fortunate enough to find a personal supply from both Malaysia and Vietnam, while within 40 miles of my current home!

As always, you’re wondering what on earth this has to do with fiber…or which of those spices is he smoking, but I’m getting there. This time around, just one year since I was last in India, I found hotel wireless connection multiple times faster than I’d experienced before, both in Indian hotels and Chinese airports. Now those networks existed before, but something has spiced them up. Fiber of course…but I’m guessing you knew that. With the increasing fiber content in PON, wireless, datacenter and even airplane networks, I can increasingly be as effective while on the road as in my own home or office.

With pluggable optics being sold into everything from fast Ethernet to 100G Ethernet, SONET/SDH OC-3 to OC-768 and Wireless 1G to 10G, I’m left wondering if the traders of the East India Company perhaps sometimes felt as we do – enabling a whole new experience for connected people all over the world with every kind of transceiver (or spice) the heart desires.

There are many kinds of networks in the world, just as with cuisine, but common to all is the need for some kind of flavor, additive, spice – for the high-speed network, fiber brings the most enhanced performance and it comes in many form factors. The Global Trading Company for these fiber-optic ‘spices’ – Finisar.

As we come to the end of 2012, we wish all of our Lightspeed readers’ happy holidays and a wonderful New Year!

ECOC Amsterdam and Stroopwafels

September means it’s time to ‘Fall’ into the welcoming arms of another European location for one of the largest Optical Components Trade Shows, ECOC. This year the show, in which Finisar exhibited, was hosted in one of my personal favorite travel venues, Amsterdam in Holland. The trip to and from was thankfully uneventful, with the welcome exception of my first flight on the double decker Airbus A380 from Frankfurt to San Francisco – that’s a BIG plane….uneventful however is not how I’d describe the transportation in Amsterdam itself. I contemplated entitling this blog posting “Cars and Trams and Bikes…oh my!”

On the face of it, Amsterdam is another beautiful European capital city, packed with historic buildings, parks, theaters and museums with the added intrigue of an intricate canal system…but once you step out of your hotel bound for one such location, you discover the adventure that is navigating the traffic flow as a pedestrian. I’ll spell it out – this is like a reality TV version of the 80’s arcade hit “Frogger”. As you are approaching what you believe to be the road – the place where the cars go – beware, 10 feet (or rather 3 meters) before you get there, look left AND right – this is the domain of the Dutch cyclist and they actually own all thoroughfares. Now don’t get me wrong, it is very impressive to see the shear volume of ‘sit up and beg’ type bicycles in various states of disrepair, ridden by everyone from schoolkids to new mums and dads with babies sleeping in on-board seats, to grandparents, all in apparent excellent health as a result…but don’t get in their way – you have more chance of avoiding injury stepping out in front of oncoming traffic during rush hour in a bustling city than walking unawares into the bike lane in Amsterdam.

Assuming you made it past the bike lane, gathered your composure and now wait for the international little green man to guide you across the street, beware – your next obstacle silently awaits, the tram! This is a very convenient and popular form of local transportation in Amsterdam, but it delivers its services almost silently, unless braking. Just when you think you’ve escaped the cyclists and navigated the heavy city center traffic, be sure to look left and right just one more time to avoid a confrontation with the tram.

Having made it safely to the RAI Conference Center, this was another successful show for Finisar, beginning with a fantastic front and center booth located at the entrance to the show floor, quite the ‘Heineken Experience’ at our customer event, as well as multiple meetings with customers, suppliers, and partners. It seems that economic challenges likely led to ever more stringent travel restrictions resulting in less foot traffic at the show this year than in previous years (or maybe some just didn’t get past the first round of Amsterdam “Frogger”) but there were no less enthusiasm and interest in the fruits of another year’s labor in the Optical Communications industry. This year’s demonstrations in the Finisar booth included a joint technology demonstration of a 12G SAS Embedded Optical Interconnect within a Data Center Subsystem (read press release), the industry’s first 2-Slot ROADM Linecard for Next-Generation Telecom Networks (read press release), a new WaveShaper 2000S Polarization Processor and WaveShaper 4000S Fourier Processor and the introduction of our 100GE CFP2 Module (read press release).

I’d like to extend a personal thanks to the Xyratex team who joined Finisar for the entire show while proudly, publicly sharing what I believe to be the most impressive working demonstration at the show this year, demonstrating an eco-system consisting of high bandwidth, high density data transmission over polymer waveguides (vario-optics) and through optical backplane connectors (HUBER+SUHNER) thanks to Finisar Board-mounted Optical Assemblies (BOA) in Xyratex’ own prototype OneStor™ enclosure. This is what makes tradeshows great in my opinion – partners in the industry breaking new ground together.

Of course, a blog about Amsterdam would not be complete without mention of its most famous local attractions, and I must admit, I did partake – I just can’t resist a good Stroopwafel!

The Swedish and Optics…

This week’s blog post comes from Finisar featured author, Tony Pearson.

My travels this summer took me not once, but twice, through Sweden. While I have been fortunate enough to travel many places in the world, I would say that Stockholm has long been on my list of places to get to both personally and professionally. The opportunity finally arose and very close to the mid-summer festival..but not quite – I’ll save that for a personal visit sometime in the future. It’s often the case that visits to the most anticipated locations disappoint, but not so for me with Stockholm.

I’ll start with the most surprising thing – the food in Stockholm is excellent. Like so many capital cities around the world, the food fare is truly cosmopolitan, with menus ranging from meat and potatoes (what I expected) to Sushi and what I consider Western sushi – tapas – all excellently presented and prepared. The level of service in all places I visited was very high, with a combination of attention to the customer coupled with what I observed to be a self-assured wit and charm that I’ve encountered in many of the folks I know from Scandinavia. The city itself is everything I had hoped and imagined – it is architecturally unique (at least based on my own travel exposure), with what appears to me to be a mix of Eastern and Western European styles. There’s water everywhere which only helps to accent the beauty of some of the historic structures dotted on islands and next to bridges almost everywhere you look. The weather at this time of year is perfect…at least to my English born sensitivities – it’s warm, sometimes cloudy, and yes, it may rain on occasion, but it’s not too hot, too cold or too wet – just right.

The most difficult element to describe is the feeling of safety and well-being – this is, I think, the most family friendly place I’ve ever been. There are real family friendly neighborhoods here where young kids can walk or bike to soccer, hockey or swim practice without the need for adult supervision and neighbors are regular impromptu dinner guests. This may not sound so unusual to some around the world, but I think this somewhat unique in a major metropolitan area of a developed nation.

Business in Sweden is conducted respectfully. This is a very tech-savvy nation in my limited experience. Sweden as a nation is estimated to be third in terms of internet penetration rate (after Iceland and Norway) with almost 93% of people classified as Internet Users – the US came in at #27 on the list a little over 78% penetration (source – http://www.internetworldstats.com/top25.htm). Finisar Sweden is at the cutting edge in terms of providing the optical solutions enabling this kind of connectivity and the associated high bandwidth demands to business’ and homes, but not just in Sweden, around the world!

Finisar Sweden is one of the newest members of the Finisar family, specifically focused on design and manufacture of active optical components such as the tunable laser, which has enabled an entire family of innovations at Finisar. The current generation of components is fueling the growth in Finisar’s Tunable product family for 300-PIN, XFP and soon SFP+ platforms. Leveraging the unique optical semiconductor expertise of a highly educated, trained and experienced engineering team concentrated here close to downtown Stockholm, Finisar Sweden is developing the components that will further enable the drive to smaller, faster, lower cost, WDM and tunable solutions that will strengthen Finisar’s position as the world’s largest supplier of fiber optic subsystems and components.

Just as a certain global supplier of fashion forward, lower cost furniture solutions from Sweden has perhaps revolutionized in-home styles in the last couple of decades, so perhaps Finisar Sweden as a new member of the Finisar Global family, will accelerate the drive to revolutionize home connectivity and the services to and within the home over the next decade.

OFC 2012 Insights from Tony Pearson

Is Light the New Heavy? A Traveling Light Report

This Finisar trip saw me beat my previous best around the world time by three full days, jetting from San Francisco to China to India and back home again the long way…glamorous as you might expect. In this posting I’ll share observations on two places, an old favorite of mine, Shanghai, and a new city on my travels, Bangalore, or rather Bengaluru as now renamed, in India.

On my first stop, I was once again amazed by the modernity of Shanghai’s transit options. This time, however, I was overwhelmed with the realization that there is an inestimable quantity of concrete that is the new infrastructure of the city. The highway leading away from the airport, for instance, is an elevated and well-groomed thoroughfare stretching many miles and often passing between tall apartment and office structures. This concrete roadway is supported along its entire length by massive concrete pillars. I want to be careful though not to paint a picture of ugliness – keep in mind that concrete was invented by the Romans and used most famously in the construction of the well-known Coliseum.

Empires have been built over time on innovations in transportation – some of the best examples are the Roman roads, the British canals, cooled produce transit in the US, and the Internet. The most inspiring to me, in the context of this trip, would be the heavy industry and its ability to manipulate gigantic concrete structures to form the new transit networks for the worlds growing industrialized centers of commerce.

Which brings me to Bengaluru…

I have never been to India and honestly I did not expect what I found in my short stay. I have often heard of the lack of infrastructure of many kinds, but what I found was an abundance of it. There are buildings, functional and beautiful, historic and modern spread across the town. It would be a major disservice if I didn’t also mention the warm welcome I received from everyone I met in business meetings, local restaurants, hotels and bars…and the food–I was an Indian food fan before this trip, I’m a bigger fan now thanks in part to the volume and variety I consumed over breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Of course, much of the current infrastructure is visibly in need of maintenance and repair and as in many cities with growing populations, there are very significant challenges in traffic management although there are few greater adrenalin rushes than making an unscheduled U-turn through two streams of traffic while navigating around a couple of cows – literally (see photos below)! I was also surprised to learn on the cab ride from the airport at 2:00am that the journey of 25 km with minimal traffic would take an hour. Here again is evidence of a modern heavy industry with the ongoing construction of an overhead city metro system and ultra-modern business campus’ with facilities to make Silicon Valley envious.

Aside from the presence of heavy industry in both cities and their respective marches into increasing prosperity on the global stage, the other thing that is common is their push to deploy national fiber-optic communication networks to support wireless backhaul and high bandwidth services to businesses, buildings and homes. The spread of this new infrastructure based on the transport of light, rather than people and goods is not so easy to see and appreciate…but it’s there. It’s everywhere.

It made me wonder if this “light industry” will have the same impact on the world as did its predecessor, the heavy industry. Will transparent strands of glass fiber transporting ever increasingly heavy payloads of light build a new Global Empire without boundaries or at least possibilities? Is Light the new Heavy?