25G and 100G optical module market

With the rapid development of 4K, 8K, big video, 5G, Internet/mobile Internet, Internet of Things, IDC, etc., new demands strongly promote the accelerated innovation of optical transmission technology. "Ultra high speed, ultra large capacity, ultra long distance, ultra-low loss and ultra-low cost" are the rigid requirements of optical networks. Optoelectronic integration, SDN/NFV and cloud are the three major elements of the evolution of optical networks. Ultrahigh speed, IP based, optoelectronic integration and silicon based, intelligent and open are the development trends of optical networks.

At present, the standardization of the super 100G is progressing steadily, the optical modules of the corresponding rate interfaces are gradually mature, and the super 100G has been gradually put into pilot and small-scale applications in 2018. In the super 100G, the commercial products of 200G and 400G high-speed transmission still have the coexistence and competition of multiple optional code types. It is necessary to make a compromise between transmission distance and spectral efficiency. At present, the high-order modulation formats represented by PM-64QAM and PM-256QAM are also beginning to compete in the research of short-range applications. The research of single carrier 400G has become more and more popular. OIF established a 400ZR working group in November 2016 and began to research. At the same time, equipment manufacturers and operators have jointly tested 400G, and a small number of commercial systems have been tested. Single carrier 400G has become one of the application options for next-generation backbone network transmission.

From the perspective of the whole 5G bearer, the transmission bearer network is divided into two layers, the core convergence layer and the access layer. Because the two layers of the metropolitan area bearer network do not completely correspond to the forward transmission, intermediate transmission and back transmission of the 5G network, the technical means of the two layers of the metropolitan area bearer network do not strive for end-to-end uniformity, but hope to use SDN technology to achieve end-to-end network business orchestration. The construction of metropolitan area bearer network is gradually evolving according to 5G and other business requirements, and it is not required to achieve the goal in one step.

The gradual commercial deployment of 5G and the growing popularity of mobile terminal equipment also pose a major challenge to the access network. The growth rate of mobile traffic is 20%~25% higher than that of the overall Internet traffic. From 2015 to 2018, after the deployment of LTE network, due to the popularity of video calls, large-scale multiplayer online games, widely used mobile payment, travel and other Internet applications, China witnessed a huge growth in traffic. The revised 5G forward transmission network architecture of China Mobile and other operators has led to a substantial increase in their demand for optical modules used in wireless forward transmission.

It is predicted that 25G wireless optical modules will be commercially available on a large scale in the 5G era. It is estimated that 50 million 25G/50G optical modules will be needed in the 5G forward transmission field alone. At the same time, the medium transmission field is also a new growth point. In the future, the 5G access layer and the aggregation layer need to introduce 25G/50G rate interfaces, while the core layer needs to introduce more than 100G rate interfaces.