Digital technology has what you could call a real estate problem. Hyperscale data centers now regularly exceed 100,000 square feet in size. Cloud service providers plan to build 50 to 100 edge data centers a year and distributed applications like ChatGPT are further fueling a growth of data traffic between facilities. Similarly, this explosive surge in traffic also means telecommunications carriers need to upgrade their wired and wireless networks, a complex and costly undertaking that will involve new equipment deployment in cities all over the world.

Weaving all of these geographically dispersed facilities into a fast, efficient, scalable and economical infrastructure is now one of the dominant issues for our industry.

Pluggable modules based on coherent digital signal processors (CDSPs) debuted in the last decade to replace transponders and other equipment used to generate DWDM compatible optical signals. These initial modular products didn’t offer the same performance as the incumbent solutions, and could only be deployed in limited use cases. These early modules, with their large form factors, had performance limitations and did not support the required high-density data transmission. Over time, advances in technology optimized the performance of pluggable modules, and CDSP speeds grew from 100 to 200 and 400 Gbps. Continued innovation, and the development of an open ecosystem, helped expand the potential applications.