Here's our soup-to-nuts summary of the most remarkable happenings at OFC 2004

February 27, 2004

6 Min Read
OFC Show Wrap: L.A. Fusion

We came, we saw, we drank beer with Arnie (sort of).

OFC 2004 was pleasant enough, relocated from Anaheim to the more cosmopolitan Los Angeles.

The mood this year was bright: Several attendees described the show as "Not nearly as depressing."

That said, the news was slow. There weren't a huge number of new developments, but we did manage to uncover a modest partnership deal, some hollow fiber, tunable components, and some ROADM activity:

  • Lucent and Movaz Seal Deal

  • Keynote Curse Strikes Again

  • Cao Unites Chinese Components Vendors

  • Forum Airs China Questions

  • Tunables Chart a Comeback

  • Hollow Fiber: No Pipe Dream

  • Fiber Makers Perk Up

  • DWDM Goes to War

  • PhoXtal Takes to the ROADM



Service Providers in the Dark?

Here's a nice metaphor for the industry: During a panel at Wednesday’s Service Provider Summit, the lights in the room suddenly went out, and apparently nobody knew how to turn them back on.

Without skipping a beat, moderator David Piehler, VP of research and development at Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT), continued to conduct the panel without lights. Someone provided him with a flashlight so that he could coordinate speakers, as the audience watched in total darkness.

When Piehler was done speaking, he continued to guide the panelists with a flashlight, asking Ralph Ballart of SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE: SBC) to speak.

"I think I’m gonna hand the flashlight over to Ralph," said Piehler.

PON Power

Maybe there's hope for passive optical networking (PON) in the U.S. after all. Hitachi Telecom (USA) Inc. was quietly showing off a PON option that takes advantage of the company's DSL expertise. The idea is to use PON to reach from the central office to, say, the side of an apartment building. From there, the AMN1400 system transfers the signal onto VDSL, delivering it to end users via copper.

"VDSL is distance-limited. So you use PON to solve the distance problem and VDSL to solve the problem of not having fiber in the last 100 feet," says David Foote, CTO of Hitachi Telecom. Hitachi has installed this architecture in Japan and is scouting for North American possibilities, Foote says.

Separately, NTT Group (NYSE: NTT) noted that its next PON step won't be the Gigabit PON (GPON) standardized by the ITU. Instead, the company likes the GE-PON option produced by the IEEE. "We are going to complete the development of GE-PON systems by the second quarter of this year," said Hiromichi Shirohara, NTT's director of access networks, during an OFC presentation.

For the more distant PON future, researchers from Samsung Corp. delivered a post-deadline paper on a hybrid PON using both time division multiplexing and wavelength division multiplexing (TDM and WDM; it's paper number PDP4, if you've got the handy OFC book). Researchers used 16 wavelengths to feed 128 subscribers off of one fiber. Most PONs today serve about 32 subscribers per feed.

One expert venture capital source (whose identity has been protected by governmental decree) testified that the proliferation of Asian optical components at this year's OFC couldn't bode well for consolidation of the market.

"I mean, there’s already three times as many companies as there should be, and this year the halls were filled with all these new Asian companies. There are 800 companies here, but we only need 300."

He's got a point. There did seem to be a whole new wave of companies from Asia marketing optical components.

Korean officials at OFC discussed their project to turn the city of Gwangju into a components hotbed, a project that's supposedly attracted 190 companies so far, none of them big names. The Korean government has put $350 million into its efforts so far. The next stage, costing $400 million and lasting through 2010, will include efforts to draw foreign investment into Gwangju, says Suk-Youn Suh, chairman of SK Opto-Electronics Inc. (SKOE).

From China, Fiberxon Inc. debuted at OFC with ambitious plans to storm the North American market (see Fiberxon Showcases Flexon Products). In just three years, the transponder vendor has grown to $15 million in annual revenues and plans to double that this year, according to Mike Bernatzki, director of sales for North America.

Simon Cao's new company, cleverly named Great China Photonic Solutions (GCPS), has impressive product breadth and possibly the world's ugliest Web page (see Cao Unites Chinese Components Vendors). It was offering a full suite of splitters, collimators, EDFA amplifiers, add/drop muxes, and more!

GCPS is a distributor for several Chinese components manufacturers. Does this mean that JDS Uniphase Corp. (Nasdaq: JDSU; Toronto: JDU) has its own version of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. to contend with? It certainly looks that way.

For academics attending OFC, the post-deadline papers were the highlight. Researchers hoping to make a real splash submit their best work just before the show, with OFC committees selecting the most eyebrow-raising for evening presentations.

No one said the process was perfect. Some folks (we think we caught a Celion Networks Inc. badge among them) were grumbling over the selection of Alcatel SA (NYSE: ALA; Paris: CGEP:PA) and Tyco Electronics papers in the category of Digital Transmission Systems. Both those companies have representatives on that particular OFC committee and -- hey, guess what? -- Celion doesn't.

The post-deadline slate showed that all-optical networking isn't dead. A team of researchers, including some from Japan's National Institute of Infomatics and Japan Telecom Co. Ltd., presented the results of all-optical rerouting tests based on GMPLS. Another team, from KDDI Corp., NEC Corp. (Nasdaq: NIPNY; Tokyo: 6701), and Calient Networks Inc., discussed GMPLS interworking between DWDM equipment and all-optical crossconnects.

Two papers ventured into the realm of all-optical label switching. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology described a method based on carrier suppression and separation. And a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara achieved optical label switching at 160 Gbit/s.

Of course, this is all research work and doesn't point to imminent products. But it's nice to know that this kind of work carries on despite the optical doldrums.

While in L.A., Light Reading was introduced to the strange world of cuisine de Arnie by a business partner from Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC).

That's right, we went to a Schatzi on Main, which is apparently "One of the Most Famous Restaurants in the World." Shows how ignorant we are. The restaurant was founded by California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger: Apparently Planet Hollywood wasn't enough for a man who has his own state.

Now, Schatzi's pushes the limit of "California Cuisine," offering a fusion of Austrian, Asian, and Italian cuisine. Have your choice of Arnold's Wiener Schnitzel, Zwiebelrostbraten, or Seared Ahi Tuna salad. And if you want something more down-home, there's always the "Pork Chops Terminator."

The food was nice, but we were most impressed by our waitress (picture not available), a Harvard Law grad who's studying for a PhD in Psychology and -- welcome to L.A. -- working for tips. Of course, she could have been an actor...

— R. Scott Raynovich, US Editor, Light Reading, and Craig Matsumoto, Senior Editor, Light Reading

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