Open Line Systems Are Winning — Slowly, Reluctantly, Inevitably
Every major carrier I spoke with in 2020 told me Open Line Systems was a niche play. Maybe useful for greenfield builds, maybe a defensive negotiating tool, maybe interesting for
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The Hyperscaler Procurement Playbook, Reverse-Engineered from Public Filings
I get asked a version of this question several times a year. "How do the hyperscalers actually buy optical modules — what are they doing that we should be doing?" The framing assumes the playbook is secret. It isn&
Lead Times Tell You More Than Vendor Roadmaps
When a module vendor sends you their roadmap slide for the next eighteen months, they're telling you what they want you to plan around. When the same vendor
Transceiver List Price Is Fiction. Everyone Knows It. Procurement Still Quotes It.
I have signed quotes in my procurement file from the same module vendor, for the same SKU, dated the same quarter, that are 38 percent apart. Different buyers. Different volume
The Last Three Coherent DSP Vendors and What That Costs You
Six coherent DSP houses competed in 2018. Three remain. That's not really three options. It's one option, one second-source, and a negotiating chip. Procurement teams who
InfiniBand for AI Clusters: Why Ethernet Isn't Enough (Yet)
Every major AI training cluster runs InfiniBand. The $5 trillion question is whether Ultra Ethernet will change that. The honest answer: not yet, and here's exactly where the gap is.
bgproutes.io vs Looking Glass vs RIPE Atlas — Pick Two
I get asked variations of this question every quarter. We need BGP visibility — do we use bgproutes.io, run our own looking-glass, or buy a RIPE Atlas anchor? Followed by
Route Leaks in 2026: Still Happening, Still Causing Outages
BGP route leaks peaked in 2019 and never went away. RPKI validates origins. It doesn't validate paths. ASPA deployment is at 3% of ASNs. Here's what PeerCortex found checking 70,000 networks.
13 Network Health Checks That Should Be Default — But Aren't
Every network has a health dashboard. Most of them check three things: ping responds, syslog isn't on fire, BGP sessions are up. That tells you nothing about the
Building Magatama: The Architecture Decisions That Hurt
Magatama is a unified security platform with six pillars. The architecture looks clean now. Three decisions made it painful to get here — two I'd make again, one I'd reverse.
// projects & tools
Magatama
Unified Security Platform — 6 pillars covering AppSec, Cloud, AI, Pentest, Runtime & Compliance.
magatama.dev →
PeerCortex
Network Intelligence Platform — RPKI, ASPA, BGP Health Reports for 70,000+ networks.
peercortex.org →
GitHub
Open source — PeerCortex, PaperCortex, ShieldX, Transceiver DB & more.
github.com/renefichtmueller →
fichtmueller.org
20+ years in optical networking, ISP infrastructure & peering. Social Networker.
fichtmueller.org →
NOGnet
Global NOG Support Program — empowering Network Operator Groups worldwide.
nognet.net →