Monday, 25 March,
14:00
–
16:00
Room 3
Organizers:
Jun Shan Wey, Verizon, USA
Vincent Chan, MIT, USA
Evolving Optical Network Architecture Towards the Next Decade
Over the past five decades, we have witnessed optical networks growing from simple connectivity to today’s hyper-connected network providing all sorts of services.
In the early decades, telecommunications operators led the development and drove the optical industry forward, building massive optical networks connecting homes, businesses, metropolitans, countries, and continents. A new era arrived when web-scale operators propelled the industry to another tremendous growth period, providing intra and inter datacenter, metro, long-haul, and transoceanic connectivity. Another turning point is now emerging. As telecommunications networks are adopting datacenter design concepts, such as openness and disaggregation, and web-scale operators are starting to provide some form of telecommunications services, the topic of whether a common architecture is the right future direction is calling for an in-depth debate.
This summit will examine how the optical network will evolve in the next decade. How will the web-scale architectural approach be adopted in future telecommunications network infrastructure? Should there be a common architecture or should there be separate ones? How to design a service-based architecture with dynamically tailored network configurations? How do web-scale operators incorporate key requirements to build smart networks: open and modular, commodity hardware, intelligence in software, scalable and efficient, and highly programmable? What will be the profitable business cases? Does the cost of the network have to be bundled with the applications for a sustainable business?
Five invited speakers representing traditional telcos, web-scale operators, system and component vendors will discuss their views and debate the most promising path forward. The audience will have an opportunity to join the conversation through interactive Q&A and real-time polls.
Speakers:
Ori Gerstel; Cisco, Israel
The Future of Optical Networking in Service Provider Networks: Defined by External Factors
Hiromi Oohashi; Furukawa Electric, Japan
Next-Generation Optical Devices for Future Network
Greg Steinbrecher, Meta, USA
Reconfigurable Photonics and Flexible AI Systems
Masahito Tomizawa; NTT Innovation Devices Corp., Japan
An Operator’s View on the Future Optical Networks, and Enabling Device Technologies: Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Program
Glenn Wellbrock, Verizon, USA
More Fiber, Less Equipment