performance challenges must be overcome as upgrades are performed on legacy, non-coherent submarine cables with 15-year old specifications. SLTE upgrade vendors must gain access to submarine cables to perform meticulous and often difficult optical characterization by flying specialists around the planet, which is time-consuming and expensive. Even when submarine cables were upgraded, would wet plant vendors guarantee the performance of their wet plant, originally designed
for their own 10Gbps onoff keyed modems, when 3rd party SLTE was co-deployed with new, coherent 40Gbps and 100Gbps modems? This is a business and not a technology challenge, and has been dealt with in different ways depending on the cable operators and vendors involved. However, the cables were upgraded, regardless. First, Open the Submarine CABLE As openness undoubtedly gains in popularity within the submarine network
industry, issues mentioned above will ultimately be addressed and eliminated, especially as the next generation of coherent-optimized wet plants is deployed. These new cables are not dispersion-compensated like traditional cables are, which actually improves the optical performance of coherent SLTE. It’s rather ironic that for over a decade, dispersion was a villain to be defeated, but is now a friend to be embraced. Coherent SLTE coupled with coherent-optimized wet plants makes upgrades easier to model and deploy, even more so when the wet plant optical specifications are shared in an open, standardized manner. A set of open, standardized acceptance criteria will also be required allowing cable operators to sign off, with confidence, on capacity upgrades from any SLTE vendor. Public, standardized wet plant optical specifications including such metrics as
Optical Signal-to-Noise Ratio (OSNR), gain profile, and bandwidth will greatly simplify the upgrade process to everyone’s benefit, operators and SLTE vendors alike. Opening cable optical specifications and final acceptance criteria is the first step in opening the submarine network. Open photonic architectures, such as adding open coupling ports to facilitate 3rd party SLTE upgrades, are also required to facilitate the upgrade process, without service interruptions. Numerous open movements are directly and indirectly affecting submarine networks today, and will continue to do so in the coming years. ICPs are driving the Open Compute Project and Telecom Infra Project that aim to open the compute, storage, and connect industries, which together comprise the cloud. The Open ROADM MSA initiative, driven by AT&T, Ciena, Nokia, and Fujitsu aim to open ROADMs,