2023 will be a big year for optical networks: Light Reading summarizes the four major trends in optical networks. News on January 3, Beijing time (Shuiyi) Light Reading pointed out that in 2023, almost all technology trends worth chasing will depend on fast connections, and optical networks will have a place among them. Fiber optics offers greater bandwidth, security and reliability than any other medium, but across the spectrum of optical networking, there are a lot of moving parts. Here are some optical networking trends that analysts say they will be watching in 2023. Plugable optics (ubiquitous) Sterling Perrin, optical networking analyst at Heavy Reading, believes that ubiquitous pluggable optics is a dominant theme. This includes the continued evolution of 400ZR and ZR+, but also a strong focus on sinking into small coherent 100G pluggables, pluggables across 5G XHaul networks, and pluggables for PON, he wrote in a note to Light Reading. Data Center Transmission Lisa Huff, Omdia's senior principal analyst for optical networking, will be keeping a close eye on whether 800G and 1.6T transmission will emerge in the data center. We are in the process of deploying 400G in the data center. As usual, there is a lot of hype around what the next data rate will be, she wrote. Omdia expects to start deploying 2x4 in the data center in 2023, she wrote. 00G and 8x100G solutions, but we won t see large-scale deployment until around 2025 when DR4 and FR4 mature and 400G starts to slow down. Deployments of 1.6T may start in 2026, Lisa said. Huff said it could be 2027 or later. Next-generation DSP recessions typically impact optical transmission system sales, but Dell'Oro vice president Jimmy Yu said 2023 could be different with so many supply chain issues. In 2023, we believe the supply shortage will be alleviated, allowing manufacturers to have more shipments and higher revenue. Jimmy Yu wrote. Jimmy Yu expects Ciena and Infinera to announce their plans for next-generation coherent digital signal processing (DSP). Cisco has announced that it will launch 1.2 Tbit/s coherent DSP in 2023. We still have no news from Ciena and Infinera. Jimmy Yu wrote. Coherent routing Finally, Omdia senior principal analyst Timothy Munks said that as data traffic grows at the network edge, network operators are looking for better solutions to collect and move it into metro and core networks. The convergence of IP and optical, or coherent routing, provides cost-effective aggregation and transmission of disparate traffic flows and provides network operators with a pure growth-on-demand business model to add capacity, he wrote