On 5/13/24 00:11, Dave Cohen wrote:

Mark,

Many/all of these points are fair. My experience is purely terrestrial and obviously both the capacity and economic calculations are vastly different in those situations, which I should have called out. 

Actually, terrestrial economics are easier to consider because you have the one thing the subsea applications don't have in abundance... power.

Fair point, terrestrial revenues are significantly lower than subsea revenues on a per-bit basis, but so are the deployment costs. That evens out, somewhat.

However, I don’t think that the optical vendor is really the challenge - I would agree that, generally, spectrum is going to be available through larger providers that are using “traditional carrier grade” platforms - but rather at the service provider level. When something invariably breaks at 3 AM and the third shift Tier I NOC tech who hasn’t read the service playbook says “I don’t see any errors on your transponder, sorry, it’s not on our end” because they’re not aware that they actually don’t have access to the transponder and need to start looking elsewhere, that’s the sort of thing that creates systemic challenges for users regardless of whether the light is being shot across a Ciena 6500 or a Dave’s Box-o’-Lasers 1000.

I think you are contradicting yourself a bit, unless I misunderstand your point.

Legacy vendors who have spectrum controllers have made this concern less of an issue. But then again, to be fair, adopting spectrum controllers along with bandwidth expansions via things like gridless line systems and C+L backbone architectures that make spectrum sales a lot more viable at scale do come at a hefty $$ premium. So I can understand that offering spectrum independent of spectrum controllers is going to be more trouble than it is worth.

Ultimately, what I'm saying is that technologically, this is now a solved problem, for the most part. That said, I don't think it will be the majority of DWDM operators offering spectrum services en masse, for at least a few more years. So even if you want to procure managed spectrum or spectrum sharing, you are likely to come up against a limited set of providers willing to sell it, if at all.

Mark.