Blog

At last year’s ECOC trade show and conference, much of talk at the conference sessions was about the replacement of 100G by 200/400G transceivers.  However, when one talked to end-users walking the show floor, a different story emerged heard.  Most data center managers whose job it typically is to oversee the smooth functioning of medium-sized data centers are not yet that much concerned with 400G ...

Lawrence Gasman is the founder of CIR and has been tracking commercial opportunities in networking and AI for many years.   Gasman’s consulting work has included both major multinationals and high-tech start-ups as clients and he has also carried out due diligence work for investment banks, venture capitalists and leading management consulting firms. He is also the author of numerous articles on the economics of technology and of four ...

5G Fronthaul Network Suppliers Showcasing Products at OFC, Market Forecasts Published by CIR The fronthaul portion of 5G infrastructure carries data from the baseband units to remote radio head. According to CIR’s report Optical Networking Opportunities in the 5G Infrastructure Market 2019-2028, the 5G fronthaul will result in new revenues for both cable and equipment makers. Previous generations of mobile telephony could rely on copper ...

CIR has just issued a new report on the global 5G network infrastructure market.  This blog discusses a few points from the study. As with the previous generations of mobile technology, 5G mobile will take a great leap forward in terms of the services it can support.  In the case of 5G, the claim is that for the first time a mobile platform will be ...

The CIR team has recently returned from the OFC trade show where much fuss was made about the opportunities for fiber optics in the 5G infrastructure and C-RAN. CIR has also just published a report on “C-RAN Deployment: Market Opportunity Analysis – 2018 and Beyond,” in which we also extol the revenue potential of the coming 5G “revolution.” CIR believes that C-RAN opportunities are all ...

Lawrence Gasman's presentation at OFC 2018 on 400 Gbps MSAs is available for download Click here: 400 Gbps MSAs in 2023  

The fastest growing market for active optical cable (AOCs) in Asia is in rapidly developing countries such as Thailand and Vietnam where large data centers are being deployed for the first time. However, China stands out as not only being the largest market for AOCs in Asia, but also because it is becoming a manufacturing powerhouse for AOCs too. In the past Chinese firms were ...

In April 2017, D-Wave closed its first $30 million investment in convertible notes and then received a conditional commitment from Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) for an additional $20 million. The conditions for this second $20 million have now been met and this new money will now flow to D-Wave Systems.  In addition, it is public knowledge that the company is talking to ...

Research for CIR’s latest report on quantum technology, “Quantum Computing:  Applications, Software and End-User Markets,” has given us important insights into which industry sectors will be the first commercial adopters of quantum computing and why. By “commercial” we simply refer here to quantum computers deployed outside of the research and defense communities.  These two communities have accounted for the lion’s share of quantum computers for ...

CIR’s latest forecasts of the quantum repeater market are shown in the Exhibit below.  The numbers come from “Quantum Networking Deployments, Components and Opportunities – 2017-2026,” a report that CIR published in October.  Based on these forecasts, CIR has concluded that in about five years, revenues generated from quantum repeaters will represent a significant and attractive business opportunity.   Nonetheless, CIR believes that our forecast ...

5G is being viewed as a technology that one day may possibly be to fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) what mobile phones were to wireline telephony. In this futuristic vision, broadband access would become all 5G wireless, with PONs relegated to the 5G infrastructure, albeit with an expanded role in backhaul.  But 5G wireless won’t be fully birthed until 2020 when the 5G standards (or at least some ...

 

This article sets forth five areas where we see five opportunities emerging from the emergence of quantum networking. Since the 1960s the digitalization of traffic on networks has transformed networking. Digital networking is characterized by information defined as bits (1s and 0s), rather than the waveforms associated with older analog networks. The rise of quantum information theory holds out the possibility of a third way ...

The demand for cost-effective high-performance cryptography solutions for data-centers continues to grow under the weight of almost constant threats of hacking, both strategic and malicious.  At the present time, asymmetric cryptographic solutions and bare fiber links form two of the most critical weak points for data-center security.  Both of these security incursions could be defended against by deploying adequate quantum key exchange (QKD) solutions. But ...

400 GigE is the first Ethernet standard not to incorporate copper cable.  There is some talk about implementing 400 GigE for ultra-short reach links on a board or even board-to-board.  But for the typical data center applications – rack-to-rack and beyond – it’s fiber all the way.  An open question is how will the fiber be implemented?  The options here being field termination and active ...

While polymer-based data communications has found viable niches in home networking and in the automotive industry, there has been no success in bring polymers in the data center.  Polymer datacom start ups have risen and fallen.  One recalls, especially, Telephotonics, which had very ambitious plans to create a full range of polymer-based optical components for the telecommunications industry. Large specialty chemical firms – including Dow, ...

For now 400 GigE is barely in its deployment phase, and its use will be confined to hyperscale data centers at first.  But we have all seen how the fastest data rates make their way downward.  It is not that many years since 10 Gbps was considered “bleeding edge.” Today some laptops have 40 Gbps (Thunderbolt) interfaces.  So it may not be many years before ...

Since its earliest days optical networking, on the physical cabling level, has been touted as much less prone for hard tapping than copper cables. But today, this is much less the case. Once somebody put their tap on in a right place, the security of the optical networking is gone. More and more studies are in public on the practicalities and theory of tapping an ...