CPRI Wireless Standard and Optical Transceivers
There are a huge number of discussions going on in the world regarding wireless network deployments. Every new smart phone has wireless data capabilities, with 3G becoming main stream and next generation LTE currently being fielded. LTE is expected to enable data transfer rates to mobile devices between 15 and 100 times faster than 3G networks.
All of this wireless data ultimately needs to feed back into the network. With the explosion of wireless internet traffic, we are increasingly seeing a need to aggregate and backhaul wireless traffic using optical fiber links.
The Common Public Radio Interface specification, or CPRI (pronounced sip-ri) for short, is a standard for wireless backhaul. CPRI was a major initiative formed in 2003 by several well-known telecommunication companies: Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, Nortel, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Alcatel Lucent. The CPRI committee set out to define a new standardized interface for the interconnect point between the Radio Equipment (RE) and the Radio Equipment Controller (REC) within a base station.
Finisar has several SFP/SFP+ transceiver modules ideal for wireless and other base station applications, including CPRI. Finisar’s CPRI reference guide provides some useful information such as typical system architecture, supported radio standards, and the physical layer specification per the CPRI standard. You can download this guide anytime from the blue download section of our web page. In addition, the reference guide includes a Finisar compatibility product matrix that should make it easy to identify CPRI-ready products for wireless applications.
One of the great advantages of CPRI is its intent not to create yet another standard that would govern optical or electrical transceivers, but rather to leverage existing standards and technologies. For suppliers like Finisar, this means we can leverage the economies of scale of optical modules that are already in large volume production and combine those volumes with CPRI wireless applications. Furthermore, Finisar’s 4 Gb/s and 8 Gb/s products are already poised to easily handle the needs of next generation wireless equipment, including WiMAX and LTE.
Please feel free to share your comments on the CPRI wireless standard and optical transceivers.
Optics | Rafik Ward | 
10:05 am
I’m intersted in your mention of the trade-offs between...
By sudhir.brahma@gmail.com, August 12, 2009 @ 7:15 pm
Hello Rafik,
Your article definitely set me thinking on other such potential opportunities. I see the upcoming “cloud computing” phenomenon making similar such significant demands for high bandwidth and in the the following 4 ways:
1. The client to cloud trunk line that aggregates all the traffic from multiple clients to the cloud based computing entity/Virtual machine
2. Access to storage: These cloud based Virtual machines’ aggregated storage access requirements into the corresponding SAN/NAS storage boxes (including access to back-end databases)
3. Inter cloud communication
4. Disaster recovery traffic from these clouds, which will most likely be out-of-band and independent of the main “production”/live data in use.
I assume that each of these will have a diverse mix of long and short haul. The ones on the truck line eventually connecting end clients could be price sensitive, but large in number. I was wondering if Finisar is looking at this upcoming market with a slew of new products? Will appreciate your opinion Thank you regards
Sudhir
By Rafik Ward, August 13, 2009 @ 1:41 pm
Sudhir,
Thanks for your comment. At Finisar, we have some interesting paths to develop low cost solutions to enable high bandwidth solutions for applications like cloud computing. Addressing some of the key areas that you mention:
1) For client to cloud connectivity, we have developed optical modules for PON applications that will enable very high bandwidth to users in Fiber to the Home deployements (FTTx) as well as the wireless-CPRI based transceivers mentioned in this article.
2) We have a very comprehensive portfolio of storage products for Fibre Channel, FCoE, Infiniband, and moving forward, SAS applications.
3) Within the data-center, one of the recent product focus areas that has been discussed in detail in this blog is active cables. These active cables are targeted to enable low cost solutions at high data-rates (10Gb/s) for short reach interconnect between servers and switches and higher data rates (40Gb/s and 100Gb/s) for Infiniband, supercomputing and clustering applications.
4) For disaster recovery, we have a suite of WDM solutions that enable Ethernet or native Fiber Channel to be transported over a single fibre over distances of 40-200km (and further) for remote recovery.
Hope this helps,
-Rafik
By Thomas, March 5, 2012 @ 5:53 am
Dear Rafik,
Have this product started mass production and also what is the adoption rate so far?
Glad to read your article here.
By Kai Ng, March 14, 2012 @ 12:10 am
Thomas,
Thank you for your question. There is no single product that addresses the entire wireless market. Instead, Finisar has put together a portfolio to address the various data rates and reaches that are commonly used by our customers. That portfolio is described in the Downloads section of our Optical Modules page found here (http://www.finisar.com/products/optical-modules).
Adoption rates are carrier and region-specific. With that said, most of these products are in mass production and have been adopted for use by specific carriers thus far.
Hope this helps,
Kai Ng, Product Line Manager, Finisar