LOS ANGELES – Nokia’s Infinera-based optical management team dug deep in describing the vendor’s latest rash of new equipment, a description that was heavy on the word “optimized” for the now wider-ranging portfolio both in breadth and timing, but also one that can be optimized through a building-block like architecture.

From a high level, Nokia’s latest key product launches included new coherent optical systems and front ends.

The new systems include a 1.6 Tb/s-capable coherent pluggable designed to IP over dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) data center interconnect (DCI) and scale across applications; a 2.4 Tb/s-capable coherent pluggable designed to thin transponder deployments that can support terrestrial and subsea network applications; a 3.2 Tb/s-capable “coherent lite” product designed to work at lower power for short-reach campus and enterprise environments; and double-sided pluggables that can pair with co-packaged optics (CPO), linear pluggable optics (LPO), and near-package optics (NPO) for campus, metro, and regional DCI and scale across applications.

The new optical front ends include a range of full-band transponders that combine hundreds of coherent components into a single “operationally simplified” platform targeting hyperscale capacity demands across campus, metro, regional, long-haul, and submarine applications; and 2.4 Tb/s and 3.2 Tb/s embedded transponders designed to maximize fiber capacity at any distance and targeted at “fiber-constrained” applications.

However, it’s how these new systems were put together that was key to Nokia’s presentation at this week’s OFC event in Los Angeles.

David Heard, former Infinera CEO and now president of network infrastructure at Nokia, explained to the audience that the four new DSPs are together “the building blocks for 13 new coherent solutions,” a notion that Ron Johnson, SVP and GM for optical networks at Nokia, later noted allows the vendor “to drive value in efficiencies in our development” despite diverging customer needs.

“We're seeing all the different hyperscalers have different … reasons for optimizing, different ways to even solve the same problem,” Johnson said. “And it's not that we want to build bespoke solutions. We're doing as much as we can to optimize what we do and how we do it.”

Rob Shore, head of optical network solutions marketing at Nokia and also a former Infinera exec, furthered that optimization path by noting the new products have a breadth of capabilities that can be tuned to different “optimized” applications based on power, cost, and performance needs.

“Instead of just two solutions, two new engines, a new pluggable and a new embedded, it's really coming up with a different methodology for building these optical solutions based on a building block principle, essentially taking the technologies and building them in these very standardized implementation methodologies, standardized control languages, standardized data paths, so that we can take those engines, now, these building blocks, and integrate them into a whole variety of network implementations,” Shore said. “Now you can get a mix and match the combinations of solutions so that customers can have solutions that are optimized for their very specific applications, and they're not leaving a single penny or a single watt on the floor.”

The new DSP products are not expected to begin sampling until the middle of 2027, with general availability expected to begin during the second half of next year. Analysts did question that timing horizon, though Shore countered that it provides customers with time to plan.

“We're building these solutions to help our customers plan their network strategies,” Shore explained. “Where are they going to put the next data center? How much power can they put in it? How much capacity can they do? What are the distances between them? They need to know that because they need to know that now for what's going to happen two or three years from now so they can make those plans appropriately, because it takes two or three years to build the data center, and when they turn it up, they want to make sure they're using the latest technology, and they architected their infrastructure to best leverage what's available at that time.”

Multirail inline amplifier dense and earlier

For those with less patience, Nokia also unveiled a multirail inline amplifier to support scalable multifiber deployments of up to 160 fiber pairs in a single rack that will be available during the second half of this year. That platform can support capacity expansion within an existing network footprint with lower costs and operational complexity.

“This will be the most dense solution in industry,” Shore said. “You've probably heard some of our competitors out there talking about their version of this solution. They're getting 128 ILAs (inline amplifiers) per rack. We're getting 160 ILAs per rack. … When this comes out at the end of the year, this will be the highest density solution, about 25% more dense than any other solution that will exist in that time frame.”

Nokia is part of a growing list of optical vendors that have trumpeted higher-speed equipment for scale out and scale across deployments. This includes recent launches from the likes of Marvell, Cisco, and Broadcom. These are all being targeted at what has been termed the “AI supercycle” pummeling the data center ecosystem.

Dell’Oro Group recently reported that the optical transport market grew 10% last year, with direct hyperscale purchases surging 50% “as they bought more WDM transponders, ZR optics, and optical line systems,” Dell’Oro Group VP Jimmy Yu wrote. The market’s top five system vendors included Huawei, Ciena, Nokia, ZTE, and Cisco.

“Looking ahead, we are expecting more of the same for 2026 with one exception: cloud providers will build scale-across DCI to expand their AI data centers,” Yu added.