Ciena's Steve Alexander: A terabit in the hand

Ciena CTO Steve Alexander recently joined the podcast to discuss the company's announcement of WaveLogic 6, a 1.6 Tbit/s coherent optical technology that will power long-haul, metro and data center connections starting around the middle of next year. Alexander also shares his enthusiasm for and involvement in OFCnet, a massive multivendor network on the OFC show floor that provided massive amounts of bandwidth to show booths and technology demonstrations.

Here are some of the topics we discussed in this recording, which was made in March at OFC 2023 in San Diego:

• OFCnet's evolution and how it helps technology companies show off the kinds of applications that will push networks forward (1:21)
• Why Ciena calls WaveLogic 6 the new standard in optical networking (6:20)
• How the relentless technology improvements have led to the reality of terabit-per-second pluggable optics (13:31)
• Alexander is paying more attention to two new technology areas after seeing and meeting with companies at OFC (17:04)

Click the closed caption button in the video toolbar for an unedited podcast transcript.

Related stories and posts:

• Ciena's hop over 1.2 Tbit/s trend could get pricey
• The Divide: Ciena's Steve Alexander on closing the connectivity and digital education gap
• Ciena starts chipping away at $4B backlog as sales surge
• Ciena unveils industry's first 1.6Tbit/s coherent optic solution (press release)

— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading