DCI Power Per Bit Has a Floor — And We're Hitting It
Every generation of coherent pluggables came with the same chart on the same slide. A clean descending curve, pJ/bit on the Y axis, time on the X axis. Forty
Every generation of coherent pluggables came with the same chart on the same slide. A clean descending curve, pJ/bit on the Y axis, time on the X axis. Forty
I started publishing everything I built six weeks ago. Eight repositories, zero marketing budget, one unexpected outcome: writing about the work changed how I do the work.
No-Travel-Day. No commits, no launches, no progress visible to anyone outside my head. What a week of rest looks like when your brain doesn't know how to stop.
Cisco says third-party optics void your support contract. The MSA says otherwise. Here's what the standards actually guarantee, what vendor lock costs at scale, and how to run the risk-adjusted calculation.
A 400G coherent port draws 16–20W. At 64 ports per chassis: 1.3kW just for optics. DSP power is a real constraint in dense deployments — and most capacity plans ignore it.
800G ZR modules are announced. 1.6T is on the roadmap. Meanwhile, half the 400G ZR+ SKUs take 14 weeks to ship. Here's what's real in pluggable coherent today.
An OTDR finds breaks, splices, and macrobends. It tells you nothing about the cause of 80% of optical link failures: contaminated connectors. Here's what actual fiber testing looks like — and how an SFP-based microOTDR changes the economics.
The ZR vs ZR+ debate dominates every WAN discussion. It's the wrong frame. The real question is whether you understand your link budget well enough to buy either.
Your DWDM line system and your transponders come from the same vendor. The amplifiers, the mux/demux, the management plane, the optics. One PO, one support contract, one vendor'
Two materials. Two manufacturing ecosystems. Two different bets on the future of optical networking. The choice between Silicon Photonics and Indium Phosphide determines who can build your optics, how fast,