Ciena is supporting world exams and trials of 1.6 Tbps community speeds, to fulfill the calls for of
OTTAWA, Canada—The present quickest middleman of high-speed networking glimmered inexperienced, gold and silver in Helen Xenos’ arms, the results of years of analysis and growth in Ciena’s Ottawa lab.
The printed circuit board, gleaming parts and connectors of the WaveLogic 6 Excessive symbolize the muse of the high-speed networking gear in excessive demand by service suppliers and hyperscalers, as they scramble to fulfill the community wants of synthetic intelligence.
Xenos, Ciena’s senior director of portfolio advertising, stated that the corporate’s clients need three issues: To scale their networks. To cut back their price per bit. And to cut back energy utilization, or watts per bit. The WaveLogic Excessive household represents Ciena’s work to fulfill these calls for, and achieve this in a number of type components for various purposes.
This WL6e showcase, throughout the firm’s latest Vectors 2025 multi-week occasion, introduced a lot of Ciena’s clients to the lab in Ottawa to see the corporate’s newest improvements in-person.
Evolving velocity and capability in networks
The velocity and capability calls for ripple throughout networks sooner and sooner lately. Within the late oughts, coherent optics had been primarily deployed in long-haul and submarine networks, then rapidly unfold to metro/regional connectivity. By the mid-2010s, hyperscale cloud suppliers had been shifting from utilizing darkish fiber from service suppliers and had begun to construct their very own customized networks. Coherent optics started to be essential not just for long-haul however for DCI, or information middle interconnect—ultimately, over tons of or a thousand kilometers, as demand for cloud computing started to actually take off.
Up to now 20 years, Ciena has elevated the info throughput carried throughout every wavelength from 10 gigabits to 1.6 terabits, or 160x. As Xenos explains, which means needing considerably much less equipment-footprint as a way to carry much more capability, whereas decreasing watts per bit by greater than 95%. The WL6e, which helps community speeds as much as 1.6 terabits per second turned commercially obtainable within the fall of 2024. Since then, a variety of 1.6 TB exams and expertise trials with suppliers starting from Telstra to Verizon, have signaled {that a} new period of AI-driven community speeds (and the accompanying upgrades) is on the best way.
“The fast enlargement and distribution of AI coaching and inferencing infrastructure is driving world funding in ultra-scalable, high-performance networks operated by each service suppliers and cloud suppliers,” stated Ciena CEO Gary Smith on the corporate Q1 2025 name, including that Ciena is anticipating “giant, long-term funding plans over a few years to come back” to assist the supply and monetization of AI. Latest evaluation by McKinsey tasks that by 2030, information facilities will $6.7 trillion worldwide in capital outlays, to maintain up with the demand for compute.
Smith stated that direct orders from cloud suppliers accounted for greater than half of orders within the first quarter, and that the corporate had seen its “strongest back-to-back quarters of orders from service suppliers in over two years.” 5 cloud suppliers had been in Ciena’s prime 10 clients for the quarter.
Smith particularly known as out WaveLogic 6 Excessive as being “off to an extremely robust begin within the market” and stated that the corporate added 20 new WL6e clients throughout the first quarter of 2025 alone. At this level, they will’t get this sort of 1.6T expertise anyplace else.
“We stay the one vendor available in the market with a 1.6 terabit WAN answer and anticipate to carry that lead on this subsequent technology of optical expertise for not less than two years,” Ciena CFO Jim Moyan instructed traders on the decision.
Knitting networks and information facilities collectively
Interconnect inside information facilities, between information facilities and long-haul connectivity are all very completely different purposes. As Xenos explains, submarine networks are maximized for spectral effectivity, to get essentially the most doable capability over a restricted and treasured fiber useful resource. In and across the information middle, the precedence is utilizing is lowest quantity of energy within the smallest doable house—which is why smaller, pluggable designs are so essential.
On the demo in Ottawa, Ciena showcased each, with the pluggable only a fraction of the scale of the WL6e modem on show. The WaveLogic 6 Nano, with assist for as much as 800G, is anticipated to be commercially obtainable within the coming weeks, with deployments in metro DCI anticipated late this yr
There are tons of of hundreds of coherent pluggables being deployed in information facilities right now. Ciena’s first quarter 2025 outcomes mirrored its highest variety of orders so far for pluggables, and the expects to not less than double its income from pluggables throughout this fiscal yr.
The WaveLogic 6 nano tech additionally helps what the corporate refers to as “Coherent-Lite”, which helps 1.6T connectivity at 2-20 kilometers for information middle interconnections and is anticipated to be obtainable in 2026. Ciena demonstrated Coherent-Lite at this yr’s OFC. That answer combines traits of coherent expertise and IMDD, or depth modulation direct detection, right into a single product. IMDD is a less complicated system design for optical communications, usually utilized in shorter-reach purposes within the vary of tens-of-kilometers, Xenos defined. It’s a legacy expertise used inside information facilities and information middle campuses—one which isn’t going away any time quickly, she factors out, however which is constrained in phrases velocity, distances and spectral effectivity.
“Whenever you’re attempting to push IMDD expertise to do 1.6 TBps, 3.2 terabit per second, it actually could be very restricted to the gap that it might probably obtain,” Xenos stated.
Higher efficiency over longer distances is required—specifically given the bottlenecks that information facilities face in energy and actual property. At the moment, AI clients encompass tens of hundreds of GPUs that should be linked. That’s anticipated to develop to tons of of hundreds of GPUs within the coming yr, in tasks just like the Stargate DC cluster within the works in Texas.
At that time, the GPU clusters take up a couple of constructing, and maybe a couple of campus—however nonetheless want ultra-fast, high-performance connections. Coherent-Lite extends flexibilty and scaling by enabling connections over, say, 10 and even 20 kilometers, reasonably than one to 2, Xenos explains—enabling information facilities to scale.
A wall of fiber
Down one of many hallways at Ciena’s Ottawa lab, a stack of rectangular, glass home windows stretch from the ground almost to the ceiling. On the opposite aspect of every window sits spool after spool of pale, gleaming fiber, tucked tidily side-by-side. These spools include, in whole, tons of of hundreds of miles of fiber, in order that the lab can replicate bodily transmission of indicators while not having to make use of an precise community.
The demo of the WaveLogic Excessive options—each the WaveLogic 6 Nano pluggable supporting 800 Gbps, side-by-side with the WaveLogic 6 Excessive supporting 1.6 Tbps—is ready to precisely symbolize their efficiency by establishing a testing situation that represents a fiber connection of greater than 500 kilometers. The community deployment isn’t actual, however the fiber is.
Ciena’s fiber spools symbolize the bodily actuality of tons of of hundreds of miles of fiber and allow the corporate to copy buyer networks with the kind of fibers that they’ve. Service supplier and fiber community operator clients, a lot of whom visited the lab throughout the Vectors 2025 occasion, can see how Ciena merchandise would carry out in their very own networks.
Constructing from the chip-level
Whereas fiber and information middle constructions typically seize the infrastructure funding headlines, high-speed networking gear like Ciena’s permits the communications throughout the bodily connections. The corporate has pushed to 1.6 Tbps with a sequence of progressive design decisions, together with what it says is the primary use of 3nm CMOS for networking, versus shopper purposes.
It’s a multi-year course of to go from formulation on white boards to code to ASICs, Xenos explains, and requires deep understanding of buyer wants, years forward of any precise deployments. However Ciena’s engineers are its distinctive energy, and as is their technical information throughout plenty of associated however disparate areas wanted to construct its options: supplies science; high-bandwidth conversions between analog and digital indicators; and the flexibility to place in play electro-optics able to 200 gigabaud (GBd), or 200 billion sign adjustments per second, to call a couple of.
“It’s very, very tough to attain that, to have the experience to do this,” Xenos stated. “We have now this experience in-house.”
Xenos emphasizes that Ciena’s manufacturing can be fabless by design, so it isn’t tied to a particular materials. Its latest coherent driver modulator relies on indium phosphide, identified for being significantly thermally secure; the corporate additionally implements silicon photonics.
“We will choose the the judiciously choose the appropriate expertise for the design for particular purposes,” Xenos stated of the supplies facet.
She continued: “We couldn’t develop this if we had been reliant on different folks. We wouldn’t have been in a position to to deliver this to market as early as we did. It offers us management over the design and management over time to market, to be vertically built-in.”
Xenos wrote in a weblog publish on WL6e earlier this yr that: “Co-development of the WL6e modem design, with consultants throughout coherent DSP, RF design, high-speed converters, electro-optics, and optical propagation all working collectively, has resulted in a product that ‘simply works’ to ship unimaginable efficiency, akin to 1 Tb/s single-carrier wavelength throughout 13,500 km, one thing that was beforehand unimaginable.”
She added: “Furthermore, the many years of expertise and distinctive insights of the Ciena staff was important in making certain that the superior expertise could possibly be manufactured in quantity, an element simply as essential as attaining the excessive efficiency WL6e design.”
One wall specifically within the lab displays these many years. Poster-sized enlargements of the layouts of a number of generations of Ciena WaveLogic chips grasp on that wall, testimony to the intricacy and evolution of each the corporate’s expertise and the complexity of recent optical communications.
The outcomes of that work are buzzing and blinking away in Ciena’s lab, and making their means into high-speed networks around the globe.
