Ciena on Wednesday revealed it’s shipped more than 100,000 WaveLogic 5 Extreme modems, stating more than 250 customers across 68 countries are now using the technology.
Launched in 2020, WaveLogic 5e is a coherent optical solution capable of transmitting and receiving up to 800G of network traffic on a single wavelength. The 100,000 shipment milestone comes after Ciena in June announced it shipped 75,000 of those modems.
Jimmy Yu, Dell’Oro Group VP and lead on optical transport market research, noted in a statement Ciena’s volume of shipments “shows the demand for high-performance coherent solutions is robust.”
The vendor is gearing up to release an update to the WaveLogic 5 line – WaveLogic 6 – sometime in the first half of 2024. According to Ciena, WaveLogic 6 can deliver 1.6 Tbps over a single wavelength across 1,000 kilometers.
Yu added he doesn’t see demand for coherent optical products waning with WaveLogic 6, “which will be a critical technology for sustainably growing networks to meet bandwidth demand that is rising 30% each year.”
“We anticipate that in five years over 50% of capacity additions will come from DWDM systems built with sixth-generation coherent DSPs [digital signal processors],” he said.
Dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) increases the bandwidth of fiber networks, by combining data signals from different sources onto a single fiber.
Like its predecessor, WaveLogic 6 comes in Extreme and Nano versions. Ciena CTO Steve Alexander told Fierce in February Extreme is for customers looking to boost network performance in big metro overbuilds and submarine cable systems. Whereas the Nano product is designed for use cases that require optimization for space, like data center interconnect and backhaul.
Ciena in the third quarter announced it received its first order of WaveLogic 6 “well before it is even generally available.” The company also noted revenue from service provider customers increased 9% year on year.
Last month, open access network provider eCommunity Fiber tapped Ciena to supply equipment for its last-mile fiber networks. eCommunity said Ciena’s tech would boost its line rate from 100 Gbps to 400 Gbps.