tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37282922711689150872008-05-16T18:10:15.857-04:00Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-11969908271146076192008-05-16T17:45:00.002-04:002008-05-16T17:59:11.415-04:00

Posted by Stephen Hardy So where was I? Oh yeah -- scale. According to Gertel, his customers were looking for Optium to supply a wider range of products, which the company wasn't set up to do efficiently. So merging with a large, complementary company like Finisar made sense. Both Rawls and Gertel say that these days, size definitely matters. "We think this industry needs a dominant player

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Posted by Stephen Hardy Alright, so I got off the phone with Jerry Rawls, chairman, president, and CEO of Finisar, and Eitan Gertel, chairman and CEO of Optium, about 15 minutes ago -- and I have a newsletter to put out. So here are few choice quotes about the merger announced today that I promise to come back and flesh out later. First, the merger was Jerry's idea. "I was on a trip in Europe

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Posted by Stephen Hardy As yesterday's funding announcement pointed out, CoreOptics plans to use part of its $25 million capital influx on new product development. In the short term, that means 40G technology; according to CoreOptics VP of Global Sales, Marketing and Business Development Saeid Aramedeh, a new IC is expected to be announced in the next few weeks, to be followed by the second half

Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-53608436501458928382008-04-28T11:02:00.002-04:002008-04-28T11:56:34.191-04:00

Posted by Stephen Hardy When I put together our article on Qwest's new FTTN roll out, we took up their PR firm's offer to field some questions I had regarding how they plan to provide the services and where. I didn't receive answers until after I had posted the story and included it in our e-newsletter that day. But thinking that late is indeed better than never, here they are. The most

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Posted by Meghan Fuller Hanna In the last issue of Lightwave Europe, European editor Kurt Ruderman noted that in less than two years, France has become Europe's most competitive FTTH market. (Click here for that story.) It may have taken another step forward today. The International Herald Tribune is reporting that the French government plans to require all new apartment buildings with more

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Editor's Note: One of our visitors asked to start a new thread. Here it is. Upon my first reading the heading, "A first step toward sanity," I'd have bet money that you were referring to Oki's breakthrough in the ultra long haul space, by achieving, reportedly, up to 160 Gbps at the present time over thousands of km's, thus appearing to find a pathway to breaking the back of PMD's stultifying

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Posted by Stephen Hardy As we reported yesterday, Tellabs has decided to walk away from Verizon's GPON program. As the story indicates, the company isn't providing many details about its thinking, other than "we did not find the deal economical." However, I have to give Tellabs credit for having the sense to walk away from a high-profile program when the numbers just didn't add up. Yeah,

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By Meghan Fuller Hanna Last week, Infonetics Research released its latest PON market forecast, which included, for the first time, a quantifiable analysis of WDM-PON. The market research firm believes annual port shipments for WDM-PON will grow at a 41% CAGR between 2007 and 2011. Neither the 41% CAGR nor the fact that Infonetics has included an actual forecast of the WDM-PON market surprises

Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-8776617731718721962008-03-13T15:20:00.004-04:002008-03-13T15:47:45.911-04:00

Posted by Stephen Hardy Everyone says that the optical components space needs to consolidate -- but, based on observations made at the OSA/Lightwave Executive Forum right before OFC/NFOEC, industry executives don't think consolidation will reach the levels necessary for a healthy industry any time soon. Here's a list of some of the barriers to consolidation that I've heard about over the last

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Posted by Stephen Hardy JDSU's Superblade announcement was one of the highlights of last week's OFC/NFOEC. The integration of a wavelength-selective switch (WSS), EDFA, pre-amplification, and optical channel monitoring (OCM) onto a single-slot blade with its own OSS certainly represents a step forward in terms of functional integration. A few hours after the Superblade announcement, I visited

Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-91456716530478319472008-02-20T17:31:00.005-05:002008-02-20T17:57:04.910-05:00

Posted by Stephen Hardy If you're reading this, you've probably already visited the story describing our picks for the Top 5 component/subsystems vendors for 2007. (And if you haven't read it, you can find it here.) Before you offer your comments, let me tell you about some of the companies that almost made it. In particular, we were impressed with companies who made aggressive moves to

Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-45751241066747061802008-02-15T15:48:00.003-05:002008-02-15T16:12:09.647-05:00

Posted by Meghan Fuller Hanna In this space a few months ago, I cited the emergence of the packet optical network platform (PONP) as key trend to watch in 2008. (Click here for that blog entry.) Certainly, the analysts' numbers indicate a steep deployment curve, with the market netting as much as $1.7 billion in annual sales by 2010, by some accounts. But not everyone advocates this approach.

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Posted by Stephen Hardy Remember those "lean manufacturing" initiatives we heard optical component and subsystem companies blame for last year's poor start? (See here and here for reminders.) Well, they're not over yet -- they're just moving farther down the food chain. In a recent conversation, JDSU's Craig Iwata, senior director of marketing and business operations, told me that the adoption

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Posted by Meghan Fuller Hanna This year's Super Bowl will have a high fiber content, and I'm not talking about the chili I'm planning to make for the big game. All the glamour and excitement of Super Bowl XLII will unfold Sunday night at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, AZ, a stadium I profiled last year in the pages of Lightwave. (See "Air-blown fiber is an MVP at University of

Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-90842151440382839302008-01-18T05:59:00.000-05:002008-01-18T06:48:21.155-05:00

Posted by Stephen Hardy Here are a few post-Fiber Optic Expo tidbits to tide you over until I'm back in the States and (hopefully) able to get back on a normal bio rhythm: The PON transceiver product line from Xponent Photonics seemed a bit out of place among the fiber and other glass component products at the Hoya Communications booth. Hoya was an investor in the company and is keeping its

Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-82094965216521132042008-01-17T09:14:00.000-05:002008-01-17T09:42:24.887-05:00

Posted by Stephen Hardy If a presentation given this morning at the Fiber Optic Expo in Tokyo is any indication, the financial community is already getting nervous about this year's prospects for the carrier market -- and by extension, capex levels and funding for FTTH initiatives, particularly in developed countries such as the U.S. and Japan. Atsushi Yamaguchi, managing director, UBS

Light Wave Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08121112529324929527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3728292271168915087.post-52374219290833876512008-01-11T12:33:00.000-05:002008-01-11T12:49:57.610-05:00

By Meghan Fuller Hanna I have a confession to make: I've never gotten the whole video game thing. I never played Pacman or Donkey Kong as a kid. I never waited with bated breath on Christmas morning, as so many of my friends did, to see if Santa had left an Atari system under the tree. Even today, I don't usually have anything to add when friends and co-workers wax poetic about this new game or

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Posted by Stephen Hardy While competitors such as PMC-Sierra, BroadLight, and Conexant Systems have released chips designed to support the development of hybrid GPON ONT/residential gateway platforms (see announcements here, here, and there), iamba Networks CEO Moshe Nattiv recently told me he isn't sure what all the fuss is about, at least in the short term. iamba develops and markets a wide

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By Meghan Fuller Hanna An interesting little item just crossed my desk from the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers' Ontario Chapter. The group today issued a call for papers for its general meeting, to be held in Hamilton on Tuesday, February 5, 2008. While this is hardly newsworthy, here's the interesting part: The meeting's theme is fiber-to-the-home/premises, etc. Call me crazy

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Posted by Meghan Fuller Hanna While snowed in yesterday, I read the most recent issue of Time Magazine, which was chock full of end-of-the-year Top 10 Lists. (They even published a Top 10 List of Reasons Why We Love Top 10 Lists. I kid you not.) Here at Lightwave, we compile our own version of the Top 10 List. Okay, so it's actually a Top 5, and it's not really an end-of-year list. Instead, we

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Posted by Stephen Hardy Haaretz.com reported on December 6 that GPON pioneer FlexLight Networks has filed for bankruptcy. (See the story here.) Haaretz's Guy Griml quotes an unidentified FlexLight executive as suggesting the company came out with a product too early. However, the executive also blamed a lack of marketing and development focus. "At some point it became apparent that FlexLight

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By Meghan Fuller Hanna Yesterday, the Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 Promoter Group announced that it is looking to enlist additional contributors for its first industry-wide specification review, to be held in Las Vegas on January 14-15, 2008 (See www.usb.org/usb30). Initially announced in September at the Intel Developers Forum, USB 3.0 is a 'superspeed' personal interconnect that promises

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Posted by Stephen Hardy Here's a belated update to the last post on SFP+ optics for Google's DIY 10GbE switch. (No, I'm not going to link to it -- just scroll one item down!) As I mentioned in the post, I shot an email to Google to ask if the stories about the existence of the switch were accurate and, if so, what they could tell me about the optics. I didn't have a lot of hope of getting a

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Posted by Stephen Hardy As you've no doubt read elsewhere, Andrew Schmitt of Nyquist Capital broke a story on his blog (and if his blog isn't on your regular visit list, it should be) about Google building it's own 10GbE switch. (Read it here.) Andrew and I have been going back and forth over the past couple of days about his description of the optics used in the switch, which he says are

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Posted by Stephen Hardy Motorola just announced the results of a survey that suggests less than a third of sports fans would rather watch a football game in person than see it at home in high-def. That compares to 45 percent who said they'd rather watch the contest on HDTV. (There must have been a fair amount of undecideds; you can check out details of the survey here.) In some quarters this

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