On 12/27/24 05:27, Edwin Mallette wrote:
They’re out there. I’ve helped stand up carriers recently that sell
them and have also bought such service from other carriers. At least
for 100G.
I haven’t seen 400G Ethernet point to point services but also have not
been asked to engineer to sell them either so I suspect that demand is
either soft or the majority that want 400G point to point today are as
Aaron says electing to serve that need via alternate solutions .
The bulk of 400G services are being ordered by the cloud and content folk.
In the telco space, 400G services are seen mostly on the line-side to
run the optical backbone. Most telco's are still ordering 100G or N x
100G DWDM services, especially on the subsea side where the distance
limits the channel bandwidth.
For short metro links, we are seeing some telco's deploy 400G in IPoDWDM
scenarios, where coherent QSFP-DD 400G plugs are cheap enough because
they only need 1 - 8 400G channels. Some of these may even be amplified
links if they are longer than 60km. But this is still quite rare.
Exchange points are also the other use-cases that will run 400G links
within their short metro network.
I think there will be some 400G interest from telco's by Q4'25 for
client-side services, and I suspect we shall start to see some content
and cloud demand for 800G services by the start of Q2'26, if not
slightly earlier.
Mark.
