What is Flexible Grid Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS) and ROADM?

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OFC/OFNEC 2012 Flexible Grid ROADMs and WSS Brief Overview

ROADM suppliers brought to the conference the piece parts the market needs to build a colorless, directionless, and contentionless node.

These include:

1) The first twin-wavelength selective switch (WSS) with flexible grid spacing and a multicast switch (8×16), which JDSU introduced.

2) The 1×15 WSS with flexible channel spacing to 25GHz at 5GHz granularity from Nistica.

3) The CoAdna flexible grid WSS (12.5GHz spacing) with port count up to 1×23. CoAdna also introduced twin multicast switches in one package and tunable mux/demux for up to 96 channels at 50GHz.

4) Oclaro offering a 1×23 WSS with 200ms switching time, touted to be the fastest in the industry. It also introduced intra-node amplifiers designed to compensate for losses in a ROADM node.

5) Finisar is notably absent from this group, but it already announced its high-port-count WSS with flexible grid some six months ago.

The ROADM showcase suggests component suppliers believe the next battleground is high port count and flexible grid. We believe the volume WSS market will continue to be the 1×9, but suppliers are competitively targeting a full product suite.

We believe Nistica's announcement is more about offering a flexible grid solution for this volume market than it is for the nominal "high" port count, which is for a 1×20-something WSS.

Flexible grid granularity is not defined, so we believe we will continue to hear about variants until a standard emerges.

Other piece parts needed to make colorless, directionless, and contentionless a reality are multicast switches and amplifiers.

Integration of all these parts is to come, once the market settles on the feature set and price.
Category
Routers and Switches
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