It's still early days for optical disaggregation too, noted Halilovic. The industry has been talking for a few years now about the move to more modular and interoperable optical sub-systems that can be stitched together in multivendor deployments to suit specific operator requirements, but Halilovic admitted "we're not seeing much in the way of deployments … all the carriers have been talking about some level of activity and have been experimenting with different approaches to disaggregated optical systems, but there's a long way to go and [currently] very little in production networks."

The elephant in the room here is what impact the current pressures put on Huawei might have on the optical supply chain, not only in the short term but looking further ahead too. Might a new breed of optical component vendors based in Asia emerge to supply Huawei if restrictions on sales to the Chinese giant by US suppliers persists? Such questions are not popular -- the topic is seemingly too sensitive for anyone to want to talk about. GlobalData's Halilovic was the only person on the first day of this event to make any kind of comment: He believes that "if the [optical] supply chain fractures there will be duplication and that will lead to sub-optimal results."

A big thank you from everyone attending this event goes out to optical components and fiber giant Corning, which has sponsored a coffee truck on the show floor with proper baristas and quality beans (from Kenya). Every industry event should have one of these… Figure 1: Bless You, Corning!! Corning's coffee cart... this was before the show floor opened and the only time there wasn't a queue to a 'hit'...

Power efficiency is cropping up more and more as a major topic at event such as this and OFC. Telia Carrier's Fridström noted that "30% of our costs is power consumption and the price is not going down … we need to find ways to consume less power."

Optical components specialist ProLabs, one of the vendors showing off its wares here in Nice, is using this show to launch its Optical Channel Monitor (for remote monitoring of wavelengths) into the European market. It's also pitching a number of products for the DCI and 5G transport markets. For more details, see this press release.

ADVA Optical Networking also had product news, with the boast that its FSP 3000 TeraFlex terminal can help optical network operators to boost their network capacity to carry up to 30x more traffic using "fractional QAM capabilities." For the full details, see this announcement.

— Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading