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OIF Q4 Technical and MA&E Committees Meeting Results in Working Group Chair Re-Elections, White Paper, and 400ZR Demo Survey Availability

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Guest speaker from Hawaiian Telcom shared an overview of its network investment, and its continued efforts to push the network edge closer to the customer

Fremont, Calif.—November 22, 2022 – OIF’s Q4 Technical and MA&E Committees Meeting, held in person and virtually November 1-3, 2022, in Kona, Hawaii, included guest speaker Francis Alueta, Hawaiian Telcom and resulted in the release of a new white paper, a 400ZR survey, and re-elections of two new Working Group chairs.

White Paper – Management of External Light Sources and Co-packaged Optical Engines

Properly managing optical engines and external light sources requires an efficient system management architecture. A newly launched white paper from OIF outlines the recommended system management architecture that enables co-packaged optical transceivers to use lasers as external light sources. It also describes how OIF’s Common Management Interface Specification (CMIS) can manage transceivers and light sources. The key feature is placing the intelligence for controlling the continuous wave light sources in the host board controller, not in the optical engines.

Working Group Chairs Re-Election

Also, during the meeting, OIF members re-elected Working Group Chairs (for two-year terms):

  • Mike Klempa, Alphawave IP Group – Physical & Link Layer (PLL) Interoperability Working Group Chair
  • Jeffery Maki, Juniper Networks – Physical Layer User Group Working Group Chair

 

Guest Speaker – Francis Alueta, Hawaiian Telcom

As Director, Network Reliability, Alueta, presented a high-level overview of Hawaiian Telcom’s investment in its next-generation network, the landmark Southeast Asia (SEA) US Trans-Pacific Cable System and backbone transport network. Next generation network plans include pushing a low-latency network edge closer to the customer and deploying a resilient, 400G backbone network. He also outlined some of the unique challenges they face as an island chain, geographic limits to route and path diversity options and climate change.

“Big Mahalo for OIF allowing me to present an overview of the architectural and operational challenges we have to overcome, as we transform our network,” said Alueta. “The work OIF continues to do will allow us to address those challenges and ensure a resilient network for our customers and the people of Hawaii.”

 

400ZR Demonstrations and Plugfests Survey – Deadline December 7

OIF is launching a survey designed to gather feedback from network operators and stakeholders on OIF’s 400ZR demonstrations and plugfests. The survey also includes collecting input on the interest of an 800ZR and/or 800LR OIF demo and reaches of interest for 800G (800LR, 800ZR, > 800ZR).

The survey is available and open to all who can represent their company’s viewpoint – module vendors, system vendors and network operators. Multiple responses per company are also allowed. Responses will be collated anonymously and summarized for presentation to the public. Interested parties, please email survey@oiforum.com. The deadline for completing the survey is December 7.

“OIF members guide its demos and plugfests, and this survey supports new directions encouraged by our Interoperability Working Group Chair,” said Karl Gass, OIF PLL Working Group – Optical Vice Chair. “Leveraging the pre-demonstration plugfest as an opportunity to collect quantitative measurements of interoperability with multiple vendors provides critical input for current and future (800ZR) Implementation Agreements.”

 

About OIF

OIF is where the optical networking industry’s interoperability work gets done. Building on nearly 25 years of effecting forward change in the industry, OIF represents the dynamic ecosystem of 130+ industry leading network operators, system vendors, component vendors and test equipment vendors collaborating to develop interoperable electrical, optical and control solutions that directly impact the industry’s ecosystem and facilitate global connectivity in the open network world. Connect with OIF at @OIForum, on LinkedIn and at http://www.oiforum.com.

 

PR Contact:

Leah Wilkinson

Wilkinson + Associates for OIF

703-907-0010

leah@wilkinson.associates

 

OIF Validates Maturity of Transport SDN APIs in 2020 Multi-Vendor Interoperability Demonstration – Results published in new white paper

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Successful collaborative multi-vendor demo revealed high percentage of network operator-favored use cases supported and high product maturity, identified areas for interoperability improvement

Fremont, Calif. – OIF today revealed the results of its 2020 Transport SDN Application Programming Interface (API) Interoperability Demonstration in a new white paper now available here. The white paper includes details on the test topology, testing methodology, technical specifications, use cases and findings.

The 2020 joint network operator, multi-vendor demo event focused on testing SDN-based programmability, control, and automation to support the industry to develop standard, robust, interoperable APIs for widescale adoption. The testing was conducted on a partially disaggregated open optical network architecture with operator-defined use cases.

“Interoperable transport SDN APIs are essential capabilities to enable open optical networks,” said Mauro Costa, Head of planning, strategy & architecture, Telia Company, a consulting network operator for this year’s demo. “International co-operations, like this one with OIF, allow the industry to progress at a high pace and Telia Company welcomes the opportunity offered by this interoperability demo. It reinforces that we are advancing in the right direction and that the maturity of the APIs implementation for optical SDN architecture is improving.”

The results of the 2020 demo were presented during a public read-out webinar held on 12 January 2021 in conjunction with Lightwave and on 19 January 2021 at a private, invitation-only virtual event jointly hosted by OIF and Telefónica. On-demand viewing of the Lightwave webinar is available here.

The interoperability testing involved three phases over ten weeks, Sept – Nov 2020, in Telefónica’s Madrid lab:

  • Phase 1: Open Networking Foundation (ONF) T-API NBI testing, Scope: ONF T-API v2.1.3 reference implementation agreement TR-547
  • Phase 2: Open terminals testing including discovery, provisioning, service de-activation and streaming telemetry
  • Phase 3: End-to-end disaggregation demo, Scope: evaluation and demonstration of end-to-end use cases

Findings and results of the testing include:

  • Vendor products demonstrate a high level of maturity and support of operator-favored use cases, based on T-API version 2.1.3 and OpenConfig APIs. Vendors have adopted the ONF 2.1.3 Reference Implementation Agreement (ONF TR-547) rapidly and with few deviations.
  • Inconsistent interpretation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RESTCONF standard was one interoperability issue identified, especially standard authentication. Clarification to RESTCONF provisioning behavior and implementation scalability were also identified as issues.
  • A particularly good level of compliance to the OpenConfig models was demonstrated by implementations, however, some areas such as key exchange algorithms for IETF NETCONF and complex use cases for device provisioning and commissioning did generate issues.

Participating vendors included ADVA, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Infinera and Nokia. Network operator Telefónica hosted the demo. China Telecom, Telia Company and TELUS participated as consulting network operators.

Additional information and an infographic describing the demo can be found here.

About OIF

OIF is where the optical networking industry’s interoperability work gets done. Building on 20 years of effecting forward change in the industry, OIF represents the dynamic ecosystem of 100+ industry leading network operators, system vendors, component vendors and test equipment vendors collaborating to develop interoperable electrical, optical and control solutions that directly impact the industry’s ecosystem and facilitate global connectivity in the open network world. Connect with OIF at @OIForum, on LinkedIn and at http://www.oiforum.com.

 

PR Contact:

Leah Wilkinson

Wilkinson + Associates for OIF

Email: leah@wilkinson.associates

Office: 703-907-0010