At a time when telecom operators look for solutions that can deliver higher fiber capacity and efficiency while enabling lower cost per bit – Infinera is driving a lot of innovation in the market with its products and solutions that are designed to help operators gain more from less.
Rob Shore, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Infinera speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the company’s focus on India and the kind of innovations it is bringing to the telecoms market.
What are the big challenges in the optical networking space that Infinera is trying to solve today?
We see challenges in two parts of the network – the core and the edge. In core networks, the big challenge is keeping up with bandwidth cost-effectively. There is a need for higher-capacity solutions that provide lower cost per bit and greater fiber efficiency.
High-capacity, high-performance, and fiber-efficient solutions are required for the core. In edge networks, the challenge is higher-capacity solutions in a cost-effective form factor that addresses hub-and-spoke traffic patterns.
Edge innovation is key to address hub-and-spoke traffic patterns while delivering high bandwidth. The challenge at the edge is similar to what’s happening in the core but with a different traffic pattern.
How important is India as a market for Infinera? Please share your go-to-market strategy here.
India is a very important market to Infinera because it’s the fastest growing market in the world. In a highly competitive market like India, Infinera is doing things differently. We are providing fundamentally different types of solutions and a cost structure that makes sense.
Infinera’s disruptive network solutions provide a significantly lower-cost cost structure for operators. And this is the perfect time for us to focus on India based on our recent innovations.
What are some of the big innovations that we can expect from Infinera’s side in the coming months?
There are four major innovations you can expect from Infinera:
- ICE6. Infinera’s sixth-generation Infinite Capacity Engine optical engine technology will set new benchmarks for optical networking addressing the need for high capacity over long distances.
- Auto-Lambda. Infinera’s Auto-Lambda innovation provides optical automation at the edge of a network to dramatically lower operational costs and reduce deployment errors.
- Disaggregated solutions. We will launch new disaggregated routers, creating a new paradigm for routing solutions that lowers the cost of deploying IP networks.
- XR optics. This will be a true game changer in optical networking. XR optics is the first solution designed for point-to-multipoint traffic, breaking the inherent limitations of traditional point-to-point optical transmission.
How do you think global networks will behave in a 5G-driven data era – how can your solutions optimize network performance in such a scenario?
5G will have a significant impact on networks, as it requires massive amounts of bandwidth in access and aggregation networks. Network operators will need the right solutions to handle this bandwidth at the network core and edge. Infinera’s solutions are optimized to help with this:
- Infinera’s XR optics is an innovation in coherent optical subcarrier aggregation that introduces a new pluggable and software-enabled architecture designed to radically reduce the cost of deploying and operating optical networks.
- Infinera’s Auto-Lambda enables network operators to simply plug DWDM optics into aggregation and access nodes, and the system automatically tunes each of the optical signals to the appropriate wavelength. The result is a dramatic reduction in the number of truck rolls and the amount of effort required to deploy high-capacity access and aggregation networks, and a simultaneous reduction in deployment and configuration errors.
- Infinera’s disaggregated router solutions are optimized for cloud-based virtualized network implementations, designed for 5G network deployments.
What are some of the important technology trends in the optical connectivity space that are shaping business dynamics for tomorrow’s telecoms and CSPs?
The future of optics is largely based on subcarriers to address point-to-multipoint traffic flows. Tomorrow’s telecoms and CSPs will need individual transceivers that can generate not just a single subcarrier but many to be used in separate ways.
XR optics was designed with this in mind. Built upon innovation in Nyquist subcarriers, XR optics enables a single transceiver to generate numerous lower-speed subcarriers that can be independently steered to different destinations.
