Ciena is supporting world checks and trials of 1.6 Tbps community speeds, to satisfy the calls for of
OTTAWA, Canada—The present quickest middleman of high-speed networking glimmered inexperienced, gold and silver in Helen Xenos’ arms, the results of years of analysis and improvement in Ciena’s Ottawa lab.
The printed circuit board, gleaming elements and connectors of the WaveLogic 6 Excessive symbolize the inspiration of the high-speed networking gear in excessive demand by service suppliers and hyperscalers, as they scramble to satisfy the community wants of synthetic intelligence.
Xenos, Ciena’s senior director of portfolio advertising, mentioned that the corporate’s clients need three issues: To scale their networks. To cut back their price per bit. And to scale back energy utilization, or watts per bit. The WaveLogic Excessive household represents Ciena’s work to satisfy these calls for, and achieve this in a number of type components for various functions.
This WL6e showcase, in the course of the firm’s current Vectors 2025 multi-week occasion, introduced a lot of Ciena’s clients to the lab in Ottawa to see the corporate’s newest improvements in-person.
Evolving velocity and capability in networks
The velocity and capability calls for ripple throughout networks quicker and quicker nowadays. Within the late oughts, coherent optics had been primarily deployed in long-haul and submarine networks, then shortly unfold to metro/regional connectivity. By the mid-2010s, hyperscale cloud suppliers had been shifting from utilizing darkish fiber from service suppliers and had begun to construct their very own customized networks. Coherent optics started to be necessary not just for long-haul however for DCI, or knowledge heart interconnect—finally, over a whole lot or a thousand kilometers, as demand for cloud computing started to actually take off.
Prior to now 20 years, Ciena has elevated the information throughput carried throughout every wavelength from 10 gigabits to 1.6 terabits, or 160x. As Xenos explains, meaning needing considerably much less equipment-footprint so as to carry much more capability, whereas lowering watts per bit by greater than 95%. The WL6e, which helps community speeds as much as 1.6 terabits per second grew to become commercially out there within the fall of 2024. Since then, a variety of 1.6 TB checks and expertise trials with suppliers starting from Telstra to Verizon, have signaled {that a} new period of AI-driven community speeds (and the accompanying upgrades) is on the best way.
“The speedy growth and distribution of AI coaching and inferencing infrastructure is driving world funding in ultra-scalable, high-performance networks operated by each service suppliers and cloud suppliers,” mentioned Ciena CEO Gary Smith on the corporate Q1 2025 name, including that Ciena is anticipating “massive, long-term funding plans over a few years to come back” to assist the supply and monetization of AI. Latest evaluation by McKinsey initiatives that by 2030, knowledge facilities will $6.7 trillion worldwide in capital outlays, to maintain up with the demand for compute.
Smith mentioned that direct orders from cloud suppliers accounted for greater than half of orders within the first quarter, and that the corporate had seen its “strongest back-to-back quarters of orders from service suppliers in over two years.” 5 cloud suppliers had been in Ciena’s prime 10 clients for the quarter.
Smith particularly known as out WaveLogic 6 Excessive as being “off to an extremely sturdy begin within the market” and mentioned that the corporate added 20 new WL6e clients in the course of the first quarter of 2025 alone. At this level, they’ll’t get this sort of 1.6T expertise anyplace else.
“We stay the one vendor available in the market with a 1.6 terabit WAN answer and anticipate to carry that lead on this subsequent era of optical expertise for at the very least two years,” Ciena CFO Jim Moyan instructed buyers on the decision.
Knitting networks and knowledge facilities collectively
Interconnect inside knowledge facilities, between knowledge facilities and long-haul connectivity are all very completely different functions. As Xenos explains, submarine networks are maximized for spectral effectivity, to get probably the most potential capability over a restricted and treasured fiber useful resource. In and across the knowledge heart, the precedence is utilizing is lowest quantity of energy within the smallest potential area—which is why smaller, pluggable designs are so necessary.
On the demo in Ottawa, Ciena showcased each, with the pluggable only a fraction of the dimensions of the WL6e modem on show. The WaveLogic 6 Nano, with assist for as much as 800G, is predicted to be commercially out there within the coming weeks, with deployments in metro DCI anticipated late this yr
There are a whole lot of 1000’s of coherent pluggables being deployed in knowledge facilities as we speak. Ciena’s first quarter 2025 outcomes mirrored its highest variety of orders thus far for pluggables, and the expects to at the very least double its income from pluggables throughout this fiscal yr.
The WaveLogic 6 nano tech additionally helps what the corporate refers to as “Coherent-Lite”, which helps 1.6T connectivity at 2-20 kilometers for knowledge heart interconnections and is predicted to be out there in 2026. Ciena demonstrated Coherent-Lite at this yr’s OFC. That answer combines traits of coherent expertise and IMDD, or depth modulation direct detection, right into a single product. IMDD is an easier system design for optical communications, typically utilized in shorter-reach functions within the vary of tens-of-kilometers, Xenos defined. It’s a legacy expertise used inside knowledge facilities and knowledge heart campuses—one which isn’t going away any time quickly, she factors out, however which is constrained in phrases velocity, distances and spectral effectivity.
“Once you’re making an attempt to push IMDD expertise to do 1.6 TBps, 3.2 terabit per second, it actually could be very restricted to the gap that it might obtain,” Xenos mentioned.
Higher efficiency over longer distances is required—specifically given the bottlenecks that knowledge facilities face in energy and actual property. In the present day, AI clients encompass tens of 1000’s of GPUs that must be related. That’s anticipated to develop to a whole lot of 1000’s of GPUs within the coming yr, in initiatives just like the Stargate DC cluster within the works in Texas.
At that time, the GPU clusters take up a couple of constructing, and maybe a couple of campus—however nonetheless want ultra-fast, high-performance connections. Coherent-Lite extends flexibilty and scaling by enabling connections over, say, 10 and even 20 kilometers, relatively than one to 2, Xenos explains—enabling knowledge facilities to scale.
A wall of fiber
Down one of many hallways at Ciena’s Ottawa lab, a stack of rectangular, glass home windows stretch from the ground practically to the ceiling. On the opposite aspect of every window sits spool after spool of pale, gleaming fiber, tucked tidily side-by-side. These spools comprise, in whole, a whole lot of 1000’s of miles of fiber, in order that the lab can replicate bodily transmission of indicators while not having to make use of an precise community.
The demo of the WaveLogic Excessive options—each the WaveLogic 6 Nano pluggable supporting 800 Gbps, side-by-side with the WaveLogic 6 Excessive supporting 1.6 Tbps—is ready to precisely symbolize their efficiency by establishing a testing state of affairs that represents a fiber connection of greater than 500 kilometers. The community deployment isn’t actual, however the fiber is.
Ciena’s fiber spools symbolize the bodily actuality of a whole lot of 1000’s of miles of fiber and allow the corporate to duplicate buyer networks with the kind of fibers that they’ve. Service supplier and fiber community operator clients, a lot of whom visited the lab in the course of the Vectors 2025 occasion, can see how Ciena merchandise would carry out in their very own networks.
Constructing from the chip-level
Whereas fiber and knowledge heart constructions typically seize the infrastructure funding headlines, high-speed networking gear like Ciena’s allows the communications throughout the bodily connections. The corporate has pushed to 1.6 Tbps with a collection of revolutionary design decisions, together with what it says is the primary use of 3nm CMOS for networking, versus client functions.
It’s a multi-year course of to go from formulation on white boards to code to ASICs, Xenos explains, and requires deep understanding of buyer wants, years forward of any precise deployments. However Ciena’s engineers are its distinctive power, and as is their technical information throughout quite a few associated however disparate areas wanted to construct its options: supplies science; high-bandwidth conversions between analog and digital indicators; and the flexibility to place in play electro-optics able to 200 gigabaud (GBd), or 200 billion sign modifications per second, to call a number of.
“It’s very, very troublesome to attain that, to have the experience to do this,” Xenos mentioned. “We’ve this experience in-house.”
Xenos emphasizes that Ciena’s manufacturing can be fabless by design, so it isn’t tied to a particular materials. Its latest coherent driver modulator relies on indium phosphide, identified for being significantly thermally secure; the corporate additionally implements silicon photonics.
“We will judiciously choose the precise expertise for the design for particular functions,” Xenos mentioned of the supplies side.
She continued: “We couldn’t develop this if we had been reliant on different individuals. We wouldn’t have been capable of to carry this to market as early as we did. It provides us management over the design and management over time to market, to be vertically built-in.”
Xenos wrote in a weblog put up on WL6e earlier this yr that: “Co-development of the WL6e modem design, with consultants throughout coherent DSP, RF design, high-speed converters, electro-optics, and optical propagation all working collectively, has resulted in a product that ‘simply works’ to ship unimaginable efficiency, resembling 1 Tb/s single-carrier wavelength throughout 13,500 km, one thing that was beforehand unimaginable.”
She added: “Furthermore, the a long time of expertise and distinctive insights of the Ciena group was essential in making certain that the superior expertise might be manufactured in quantity, an element simply as necessary as reaching the excessive efficiency WL6e design.”
One wall specifically within the lab displays these a long time. Poster-sized enlargements of the layouts of a number of generations of Ciena WaveLogic chips dangle on that wall, testimony to the intricacy and evolution of each the corporate’s expertise and the complexity of recent optical communications.
The outcomes of that work are buzzing and blinking away in Ciena’s lab, and making their manner into high-speed networks around the globe.