The exponential growth in traffic generated by applications such as 5G, smart cities and content providers creates a new challenge for operators on how to reduce the operational costs of their optical network while increasing the revenue of the services to be offered.

The exponential growth in traffic generated by applications such as 5G, smart cities and content providers creates a new challenge for operators on how to reduce the operational costs of their optical network while increasing the revenue of the services to be offered. One technology that is growing in adoption is the disaggregation of the optical network components. The concept of optical disaggregation is focused on the way that an operator can select the components of a WDM system, as there is no requirement for them to be from the same vendor. Adopting this strategy allows operators to have greater flexibility in choosing the components of their WDM network and no longer locks them in to a single vendor.

This video is part of an ongoing training playlist, which reviews the fundamentals of Optical Networking. This module gives an overview of reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) and how they function in an optical transport system. It provides a thorough overview of the the evolution of the Optical add-drop multiplexer to a software configurable ROADM.