Indeed, it was a difficult time. The entire optical market had just crashed, and everybody was focused solely on efficiency and reducing costs.

Probably the most depressing statement I heard was during a speech at a celebration dinner in 2003 for the ratification of the XFP MSA. I had been with Finisar for only a month, and as we were celebrating the fine work that had been put into completing the XFP MSA, an individual from a system OEM (who shall remain unnamed to protect the innocent), stood up and said “I would like to see optics become a commodity – not a commodity like gold, but a commodity like rice.”

Fortunately that viewpoint is changing. Many of our customers, the systems manufacturers, are in a position where it is increasingly difficult to differentiate their systems. In addition, next generation optical technology has become increasingly difficult to develop. Datacenters are demanding reaches outside of those specified in the standards. Parallel optics are enabling system densities that were unheard of a few years ago. ROADMs are increasingly ubiquitous in telecom networks, all based on WSS’s (wavelength selective switches). The line-side of telecom has become increasingly more complex with differing modulation formats; and trade-offs between reach, bandwidth and spectral efficiency are becoming a reality as we move to higher data rates.

As such, customers are now seeing that aligning with specific optics vendors that can provide differentiated optical technology can go a long way to helping them improve their margins and market position.

I believe this is a very positive trend in our industry and increasingly allows us to challenge our intelligent and creative people to develop innovative ideas for meeting the demands of next generation networks. At Finisar, we continue to work on developing products that enable our customers to be successful and we certainly hope to see this trend continue.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

“…There’s a deeper vein of innovation running through the companies that supply the infrastructure to the new economy. They’re not so well known but they deserve recognition…[Finisar] maker of optics subsystems for LAN, WAN, MANs is consistently referenced as an innovator.”

We are honored to have had our efforts recognized by Haydn and featured on the Forbes blog. As Haydn explains in the article, he gave these ranking to companies who are consistently referenced online as being innovative, creative or best in class. At Finisar, we are constantly trying to push the envelope and offer our customers the best products possible. So here’s a big thank you for the acknowledgement and support to Haydn, our customers and all of you!

You can read the article in its entirety on the Forbes blog here: “Which Are The Five Most Innovative Tech Companies in America?”

Last week took me and approximately 10,000 of my closest colleagues and friends to arguably the largest annual fiber optic components show, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) this year in Los Angeles, California.

Pre-show attention this year was focused as much, if not more, on the choice of venue than the anticipation of what’s new and exciting in the industry. The reason was simple, most veterans of OFC who attended when it was last held in L.A. in 2004, have a story of alleged ‘near death’ experiences getting to/from the show floor to hotels, restaurants or parking lots. While there are unconfirmed stories that several would be attendees did not travel to the conference this year for this very reason, the show did appear well attended and all the usual suspects were well represented on the show floor. From my own experience this year, I’d say the show organizers came through on their promise to provide at least a safe location with newer amenities close by. The pre-show fears were thankfully unfounded at least for those of us lodging at the nearby L.A. Live neighborhood. I don’t believe there’s a venue in mainland U.S. that would fully measure up to the San Diego Gaslamp Quarter where we’ve all been spoiled for the last few years.

On the business front this was another busy and successful show for Finisar, beginning with a fantastic booth location, another hit for the Grammys (excuse the pun) at the Finisar Customer event, as well as multiple meetings with customers, suppliers, and partners. This year’s demonstrations in the Finisar booth included Flexgrid™ technology in the WSS, 100GE over 20km using Finisar 25G DFB’s in the pluggable CFP form factor and an 80km link demo in the SFP+ form factor for 10GBase-ZR and SONET/SDH OC-192 protocols. I’d like to extend a personal thanks to all who visited with us and invited us to enjoy the fruits of their labors over the last year and specifically for the show.

There is always some sadness at the end of OFC/NFOEC as we all sit on planes, trains and automobiles headed home, that within our community of Fiber Warriors, there is just never enough time to both discuss all topics in detail nor just socialize a little with those we sometimes only see at trade shows or bump into in lobbies, meeting rooms, standards and MSA meetings. There is often precious little time to walk the floor just to see what everyone’s been working on this year and chosen to share publicly. With the few minutes I managed to set aside to take a look around, I was once again pleased to see an industry focused on the NEW: many demonstrating 25G optical links, 100G offerings in standards based form factors, parallel optics and AOC solutions, the OLD(er): high volume and ever growing small form factors pluggable modules continuing the march upward in bandwidth, and of course in the spirit of innovative collaboration pervasive in our industry, the BORROWED: several booths presenting live demos based on collaborative solutions such as the Agilent/Finisar collaborations at the Agilent booth for both 16x FC and 100G live demos.

With the OFC/NFOEC Registration area sponsored by Finisar this year and a booth location front and center on the trade show floor, this was an industry event filled with Finisar BLUE.

Finisar Booth at OFC 2011

Friendly Finisar Staff at the 100GE CFP module demonstration

Better fibres, please.

Silica is a wonderful material and we all love it dearly for its incredible transparency, strength and (now we know how to do it) ease of processing. However, it still isn’t ideal. It does have some loss and, possibly even worse, has a level of non-linearity. The combination of the two means that we still don’t have the perfect transmission medium. So my first Christmas wish is for a fibre which has zero loss and no non-linearity. Maybe some of the hollow-core Photonic Crystal Fibre designs that have been proposed will get us there in the end, but I haven’t seen any signs of real progress towards practical, manufacturable designs which could be useful in a real-world transmission system. Since we will therefore always have some form of loss, this leads to my second wish…

More Gain.

Since we don’t have zero loss fibres, we need optical amplifiers. As an industry, we have been incredibly fortunate that the EDFA gain region and the minimum loss window of silica coincide so well. This has supported the development of DWDM systems in all their shapes and sizes over the past 25 years. However, as we keep pushing system capacity, we’re running out of gain in the EDFA (even allowing for L-band) and having to drag Raman amplifiers kicking and screaming into the mainstream of technology. However, Raman amplification has its own issues (particularly noise figure) and what we’d really like is an amplifier with 0dB noise figure, 30+ dB of gain, saturated output powers of >+20dBm and operating over a 200nm bandwidth. Phase Sensitive Amplifiers show some promise here, although the technology is still very immature and is unproven at a network level.

Polarisation be gone.

With the imminent introduction of coherent transmission systems, Polarisation Mode Dispersion (PMD) will no longer be the bugbear it was for high-speed 40G systems. However, our old friend PDL (Polarisation Dependent Loss) now becomes a limiting factor, so my final wish is for optical components with no PDL (or Polarisation Dependent Gain – PDG).

I am sure there are other things we could wish for– let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

In the meantime, have a cool yule and a restive festive.

I set out for the European Conference in Optical Communications (ECOC) in Turin this month with an open mind. The amount of data in the digital universe may be growing at a phenomenal rate, but are the fortunes of optical components vendors on a corresponding upwards cycle?

I was pleasantly surprised to find a very positive vibe on the show floor. Industry consolidation, oversupply and commodity products are no longer the main topics for discussion. Instead vendors are talking about how to differentiate their offerings, and some are even complaining that they can’t keep up with demand. There are several names that could fit the bill here, but since this is a Finisar blog, I’ll talk about Finisar. [Ed note: good idea!]

Just a few weeks prior to the show, Finisar announced Flexgrid technology for its wavelength selective switches (WSS), which allows telecoms carriers to define wavelengths that don’t conform to the ITU grid. Flexible channel spacing will probably be needed to accommodate future bit rates such as 400 Gbps or even 1 Tbps, which will occupy a non-standard amount of space. For instance, a 400 Gbps channel might take up 75 GHz of bandwidth, while 1 Tbps could occupy 150 GHz.

Verizon executives explained at ECOC how they will need this flexibility in order to ensure their networks are ready for 1Tbps upgrades, which are likely to be needed during the working lifetime of WDM equipment being designed today. Finisar’s WSS technology, which is based on that found inside digital projectors, has an advantage because it can easily be programmed to accommodate different channel spacings – it’s simply a software change.

The cold, hard data suggest that the components industry is on an uptick. In the couple of weeks since the show there have been no fewer than three positive market forecasts from research firms, including iSuppli, LightCounting and Infonetics, but my favourite data point comes from Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst for optical at Infonetics Research, who spoke at the ECOC Symposium on 100GbE.

The market for optical hardware is pretty substantial, and currently worth £13 billion annually, according to Infonetics. The spending patterns in this market are shifting away from legacy Sonet/SDH hardware and towards WDM equipment. Right now the balance is about 50:50, but by 2014 the market will be roughly 70% WDM equipment.

“This is very good news for components vendors because the bill of materials [for optical components] is much higher in WDM systems,” Schmitt pointed out. “While the overall [optical hardware] market is growing at around 5% annually, if you’re making components your market is growing at closer to 10%.”

Pauline Rigby is editor of the blog Opticalreflection.com