Ciena

TIL about Ciena.

We provide the technology that powers telecoms networks basically. For them to get that high-speed connectivity, Ciena’s technology goes on the ends of those fiber cables that allows the speed and throughput to continue to drive the capacity. …. think 96 percent of the major carriers around the world — are Ciena customers

They use  Wavelength Division Multiplexing to basically send more and more light data on the same physical network. That’s amazing.

WDM which is the fundamental technical innovation Ciena is built around. WDM is absolutely key to how the modern internet works, and most people have no idea it exists. The basic idea is that WDM uses multiple wavelengths of light to fit more data onto a single fiber optic cable, which allows those cables to deliver more and more information over time … With DWDM, vendors have found various techniques for  cramming 40, 88, or 96 wavelengths of fixed spacing into the C-band spectrum of  a fiber.

I first learned about multiplexers via the open source library StackExhange.Redis. We used this when we were setting up Redis over at accesso Showare.

But I never imagined that the same technique could also apply to the physical medium!