Optical component shortages are not something we have heard about much since the CLEC bubble of the late nineties yet Jim Theodoras – Director of Technical Marketing at ADVA Optical Networking explained he had recently come from an optical trade show where this was being discussed.

In a discussion, Theodoras pointed out that his company has been a slow and steady grower for a number of years with a strong cash position (recent earnings). In addition, a key to their success has been a diverse product line from NIDs to DWDM equipment. While ADVA doesn’t focus on winning with the smallest margins or lowest price, they do look to be trusted partners with their customers and look to be in the problem solving business as opposed to pushing out cookie-cutter solutions.

Jim shared that a trend they are seeing is 1 Gbps fiber to the desk. He further explained that 10 gigabit PON is too little too late and ADVA’s approach is WDM PON which theoretically scales indefinitely. Another area of growth is in the low latency market and the importance of such solutions is something I discussed just yesterday with Hunter Newby the CEO of Allied Fiber (see video below).
 

The high-frequency trading market is a super-bright spot in tech as well as the optical space and Theodoras claims his company can shave 30-40% off [typical] latency figures – performance worth paying for as time is obviously money in this line of work. Other highlights of our talk had to do with 100 GbE – a speed which many want to get to but the cost is often prohibitive at 10-14x the expense of 10 GbE. ADVA’s 100 GbE solution is lower in cost at around 4-6x but is limited to about 500 kilometers.

Below ADVA Optical Networking’s Jim Theodoras discusses some of these ideas and a whole bunch more such as backhaul and VoIP with TMC’s Erik Linask

With Intel’s recent blow-out earnings and talk of fiber component shortages I am reminded of the market’s heyday a decade ago when your grandmother owned super high-flying optical stocks like JDSU and SDLI (remember those?). We obviously aren’t replicating the go-go days of the dotcom boom but the importance of technology and broadband and the resilience these spaces have had to the overall downturn of the global economy certainly inspire confidence I haven’t felt in a number of years. I hope it continues.