The Future Development Direction Of Optical Communication

The Future Development Direction of Optical Communication

 

Is the optical communication market overheating, and has it fallen into a new bubble?

The whole process of the previous round of optical communication industry from rise, prosperity to collapse.

First, although the previous optical communication bubble eventually burst, it laid a solid physical foundation for the subsequent development of the Internet, mobile Internet and FTTx (Fiber to the Building/Home).

Second, a certain degree of bubble actually promotes technological innovation and industrial development, as it can accelerate technological iteration and resource integration.

 

However, this time, the development of the optical communication industry driven by artificial intelligence is essentially different from the previous bubble - the current application scenarios are broader, the demand is more solid, and the industrial development will last longer. Moreover, after the baptism of the previous round, the optical communication industry has accumulated rich experience and can more rationally deal with problems such as local bubbles and production capacity control.

 

An interesting phenomenon is that the current hotspots in the optical communication industry are constantly expanding, from optical modules in the past to optical fibers now. Who would have thought that optical fibers, which were once considered to be overcapacity, are now in short supply? At the same time, the application scenarios of optical communication have expanded from Scale-Out and Scale-Up to Scale Across. More importantly, the application of artificial intelligence has just started, the era when computing power is popularized every moment and to everyone has not yet come, and the highlight moment similar to the iPhone in the Internet era has not yet appeared. Just imagine, when computing power is truly popularized, the scale of the optical fiber transmission network we need will be several times or even dozens of times that of today.

 

Recently, NVIDIA has begun to invest in traditional telecom upstream and downstream enterprises, which also sends a positive signal to the industry. To directly answer your question: the development prospect of the optical communication industry is very broad, and the industry generally recognizes that the predictable golden development period is at least 3-5 years, or even longer. Of course, there will inevitably be ups and downs in the market development process, which requires each of our enterprises and every practitioner to improve their ability to control and seize development opportunities.

 

In today's era of rapid growth in the AI computing power interconnection market, it is indeed difficult to predict the specific development in three years, but thanks to the new round of development opportunities in the optical communication industry, we are full of confidence and hope for the future. In the future, in addition to continuing to focus on computing power Scale Across and DCI markets, we will also expand to the deployment of next-generation fiber metropolitan area networks and long-haul networks. Optical solutions in computing power centers have been popular in the fields of Scale-Up (vertical expansion) and Scale-Out (horizontal expansion) for two or three years, mainly used for internal connections in large computing power centers. However, with the surge in demand for distributed inference, the rise of the Token economy, and the practical problem of power supply shortage in centralized locations, distributed computing and edge computing are rising rapidly. The optical connection for computing needs between computing power centers belongs to the category of Scale Across.

Second,

 

The first is fiber access network products. The layout in the field of fiber access networks provides profound technical and experience support. With the wide application of artificial intelligence, the scale of the entire optical communication from the core network to the access network needs to be expanded several times, which is a huge market opportunity for us.

 

The second direction is powerful network management products, as well as long-term experience in docking with customer network controllers, and AI agent technology, which helps customers realize intelligent maintenance and operation of the network and improve network operation efficiency. At the same time, we pay attention to the application of optical technology in space communication, vehicle-mounted optical communication and robot fields, and are looking for partners in these fields to tap new growth opportunities. In the next decade, optical technology will have a broader scope of application.