- Ciena is hosting its annual get-together for customers to collaborate on the latest optical technologies
- At this year's event, Ciena is touting its ground-breaking WaveLogic 6 technology
- The full size of WaveLogic 6 is capable of 1.6 Tbps
CIENA VECTORS EVENT, OTTAWA, CANADA — They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. And that is absolutely true in the case of Ciena’s WaveLogic 6.
WaveLogic is Ciena's series of advanced coherent optical technology that enables high-capacity, programmable and energy-efficient data transmission over fiber optic networks.
WaveLogic 6 has already caught the eye of several big-name customers. Swedish telecom company Arelion, for instance, is using it for a 470 kilometer route from Ashburn, Virginia to Virginia Beach. Meanwhile, the Australian operator Telstra has also adopted WaveLogic 6 for two different 700 km routes.
Notably, Lumen Technologies recently said it will employ Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 to beef up its connectivity for cloud and data center operators, which includes high-profile customers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Meta.
Kye Prigg, Lumen’s EVP of Enterprise Operations, previously told Fierce "Not only are we essentially doubling the size of [our] fiber network, we are using the right technology – like Ciena’s optical tech – to meet massive connectivity demand now and well into the future."
And Ciena's momentum continues to build. During Q1 2025 earnings, Ciena CEO Gary Smith said the company added 20 new customers for its WaveLogic 6 Extreme solution. The company's Rebecca Smith, SVP of corporate marketing and communications, calls WaveLogic, “the foundation of our optical portfolio.”
Technical talk
The company likes to tout its “firsts” when it comes to WaveLogic. It was the first to reach 1.6 Tbps; the first to use a 3 nanometer digital signal processing ASIC; and the first to use a 200 GBaud receiver and modulator. Ciena competitors Nokia, Cisco and Fujitsu are behind, comparatively, with coherent optical platforms that only provide 1.2 Tbps throughput.
Each generation of WaveLogic approximately doubles the throughput and halves the power requirements of the previous generation. The full-size of the latest generation, WaveLogic 6, is capable of 1.6 Tbps.
Helen Xenos, senior director of product marketing at Ciena, said, “Over the past 15 years, we have increased capacity by 400 times per year, while reducing power per bit by greater than 95%.”
The above picture definitely speaks 1,000 words when it comes to showing how WaveLogic saves space. It shows the WaveLogic 2 device from 2009 (far left); WaveLogic 5 from 2020 (middle); and the WaveLogic 6 Nano from 2025 in a plug format. WaveLogic 2 is capable of 100 Gbps; while Wavelogic 5 and the WaveLogic 6 Nano are capable of 800 Gbps.
Ciena executives said on a recent earnings call that the WaveLogic 6 nano will be generally available in the first half of 2025, with metro data center interconnect deployments slated for the back half of this year.
Fierce Network asked Xenos if Ciena is working on the next iteration of WaveLogic and whether it will be called WaveLogic 7? She wouldn't commit to the exact name, but she said, “We’re definitely working on it. But every time we develop the next generation it has to provide meaningful advancements compared to the previous generation. It’s a very intense process.”