Cisco Pinnacle Awards/Strategic Impact Winner: ​​​​​​​Routed Optical Network w/400G Pluggable Optics

The Cisco Pinnacle Awards - Strategic Impact Winner: ​​​​​​​Routed Optical Network w/ 400G Pluggable Optics

The Pinnacle Awards are Cisco’s top recognition, honoring contributions furthering Cisco’s legacy of technical innovation. Strategic Impact Award winners, Routed Optical Network with 400G Pluggable Optics, share their innovation.

KUMAR REDDY: The problem that Routed Optical solves for customers is to lower the cost per bit of transport. There are three major components to this solution. There's the pluggable digital coherent optic, there's the router portfolio, and there's the automation portfolio. The three of those combine together to make a cohesive complete solution for the customer, and that reduces capital costs, there are fewer things to buy, it reduces operational costs, there are fewer things to power, and it increases the possibility of operational simplification because you can have a single brain to manage more parts of the network than before.

LORENZO GHIONI: 400G modules are key to the solution. I would say they have been the game changer. The possibility of having that DWDM integrated into the same exact form factor of any other 400G client interface or gray optics interface made the game possible.

JONAS GEYER: For the first time, we own all key components of this module, not just the DSP, ASIC and the optical transmitter and receiver components, but this time, also the laser and optical amplifier and filter.

TORBEN NIELSEN: We also developed a new packaging technology where we 3D stack these individual components, and we can integrate the optics with the DSP to give us the best performance and provide the most integrated solution.

LONG CHEN: We are developing all the key technologies together in-house, and that allows us to be able to reduce the module cost and then also in the module price the customers see, and so none of our competitors have all the key building blocks that we do.

JONAS GEYER: When we started out maybe three or four years ago, people thought this was impossible to fit such a 400 gig module into this QSFP-DD form factor, but we pulled it off.

KUMAR REDDY: It moves spend to an area where we're very strong and very likely to capture the share and drive revenue upwards, so a significant business opportunity.

LORENZO GHIONI: And who are of the customers everybody that has a transport network, which means pretty much every telecommunication operator in the world is a potential customer of routing optical networking.

KUMAR REDDY: This sort of opportunity to really transform how service providers build their networks - It doesn't happen very often. It's like a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and to see customers get on board, our competitors to follow us, it's really exciting.