Coherent optical transmission technology

Looking back at history, the launch of popular AI applications is equivalent to the rapid growth of global data traffic in 2016-2018 brought by popular audio and video applications such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and King of Glory in the 4G era. Operators and cloud manufacturers have entered the capital Expenditure high growth cycle. In this context, implementing new large-capacity communication transmission technologies such as CPO, wavelength division & coherent technology, 800G optical modules, quantum communication, and high-speed optical chips is expected to accelerate, and the optical communication sector is expected to usher in high growth expectations.

Coherent technology is obviously underestimated as a high-barrier and large-capacity transmission technology, and 100G/200G will be widely deployed in metro access networks. Domestic Huawei and China Unicom will launch corresponding pooled metropolitan WDM solutions in 2022, hoping to replace the 10G non-coherent DWDM ports on the aggregation layer of the existing network with cost-effective 100G/200G short-distance coherent modules. We predict that the coherent market is expected to achieve growth of more than 50% in 2023. The annual growth rate of metropolitan area network traffic is between 25-40%, while the annual growth rate of the long-distance backbone is only 5%-15%. Operators are more inclined to upgrade the WDM system in the metropolitan area network and access network.