OIF membership inaugurated a pair of projects at their recently concluded Q319 Technical and MA&E Committees Meeting in Montreal, Canada. The first effort targets a higher baud rate coherent driver modulator and the second seeks to create a white paper that describes low-rate service multiplexing using FlexE and 400ZR.
The “Higher Baud Rate Coherent Driver Modulator” project will follow on from the High Bandwidth Coherent Driver Modulator (HB-CDM) Implementation Agreement (IA) published last year. The higher baud rate driver modulator will support at least 96 Gbaud, with an eye toward support of the coherent market’s low modem implementation penalty segment, for single optical carrier line rates beyond 400 Gbps at longer reaches.
The white paper will attempt to clarify how the new 400ZR specifications can be used in low-rate service multiplexing. The membership sees network operators looking for a multiplexing scheme to support lower-rate Ethernet clients (e.g., 4x100GE) into a 400ZR coherent line – a task for which FlexE is suited.
“It’s clear that OIF is not resting after a successful effort to standardize 400ZR, proven by the launch of two new projects at the recent Q3 meeting,” said Andrew Schmitt, founder and directing analyst, Cignal AI, who gave a presentation on the pluggable market at the meeting. “Also, as interest in pluggable coherent solutions grows, it is good to see OIF soliciting feedback from additional network operators in order to shape requirements for next generation standards.”
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