On 4/20/24 13:39, Saku Ytti wrote:
Oh I don't think OTN or WAN-PHY have any large deployment future, the cheapest option is 'good enough' and whatever value you could extract from OTN or WAN-PHY, will be difficult to capitalise, people usually don't even capitalise the capabilities they already pay for in the cheaper technologies.
A handful of OEM's still push OTN like it has just been invented, especially those still pushing "IPoDWDM" :-). Fair point, if you have a highly-meshed metro network with lots of drops to customers across a ring-mesh topology, there might be some value in OTN when delivering such services at low speeds (10G, 25G, 2.5G, 1G). But while the topology is valid, most networks aren't using high-end optical gear to drop low-speed services, nowadays. Even though on a per-bit basis, they might be cheaper than 1U IP/MPLS router looking to do the same job if all you are considering is traffic, and not additional services that want to eat packets.
Of course WAN-PHY is dead post 10GE, a big reason for it to exist was very old optical systems which simply could not regenerate ethernet framing, not any features or functional benefits.
In our market, we are trending toward a convergence between 10G and 100G orders intersecting for long haul and submarine asks. But pockets of 10G demand still exist in many African countries, and none of them have any WAN-PHY interest of any statistical significance. That said, I don't expect any subsea cables getting built in the next 3 years and later will have 10G as a product on the SLTE itself... it wouldn't be worth the spectrum. Mark.