Lafite's Blog

We are now starting to see commercial 5G networks going live. Previous generations were focused on consumer and personal communications but now 5G will serve consumers, enterprises and take the internet of things to the next level, where superior connectivity is a prerequisite. Initially, 5G will be a capacity enhancer in metropolitan areas and enhanced mobile broadband and fixed wireless access will be ways for operators to address explosive traffic growth. According to LightCounting, 5G will drive significant growth in the global market for optical transceivers since 2019, especially in China. At the same time, the demand for low-speed optical devices below 10G will gradually decrease and increase in the demand for transceivers of 25G, 50G, and 100G. The change of optical transceiver demand is driven by 5G revolution. RAN architecture of the 5G system will realize the separation of CU and DU, which determines that 5G wireless network will include fronthaul, midhaul and ba...

An Overview of WDM WDM stands for Wavelength Division Multiplexing. WDM is the most important and most popular method to increase the capacity of a single strand of fiber.   Traditionally, only one colored light was used on a single strand of fiber to carry the information, such as 1550nm light. However, starting from the early 1990s, the Internet boom pushed service providers to find a method to increase the capacity on their network in the most economical way. That is when WDM devices were invented. In a WDM system, many different colored lights are combined by a WDM multiplexing device and put into a single strand of fiber, each color is called a channel. On the receiver side, each color is separated into its own channel by a WDM de-multiplexing device. It shows that a single fiber's capacity is increased by 40 times with a 40 channel WDM. The beauty of WDM is that you only need to upgrade the end equipment, no need to dig up trenches to bury more fibers, which is mu...