Advancing Optical Networking: How the R&E Community Supports and Benefits from OFCnet Innovations at OFC 2025

JoAnne: Participating in OFCnet aligns with our mission to advance networking in support of research and education. By contributing to the network and the event, we help facilitate another venue for researchers to demonstrate their networking and computation innovations to a global audience.

Participation also gives R&E network engineers new exposure and hands-on experience with different technologies and vendors. The opportunity to work directly with peers and colleagues from other institutions helps us build new relationships and expand our collective knowledge base. 

Finally, through the demonstrations we support and access to the OFC Exhibit, we get an up-close look at emerging technologies such as quantum networking and key distribution. This enables us to start laying the groundwork for the next generations of the Internet2 network.

JoAnne: Multiple R&E organizations are volunteering and contributing to OFCnet alongside industry leaders in various ways. My colleague Ross Shaffer, Internet2 network engineer, and I are part of the volunteer team building the network. We are collaborating with CENIC and ESnet to deliver a number of network services to the convention center show floor in San Francisco via the Sunnyvale point-of-presence (POP), with CENIC providing additional connectivity from its POP in Los Angeles. Ciena, Adtran, and Juniper are also contributing to the effort, providing hardware to support the connectivity.

In conjunction with Ciena and ESnet, we are also providing optical wave services from Salt Lake City directly to the OFCnet exhibition space via our Sunnyvale POP to connect FABRIC nodes in Salt Lake City to a portable FABRIC cluster operated by Ciena on the show floor. This collaboration highlights how multiple organizations bring their expertise and resources to support a shared goal.

JoAnne: I’ll use the connections supporting FABRIC as an example to show how events like OFC can advance technology within our community. For this project, Internet2, working with Ciena, deployed brand-new WaveLogic 6e transponder cards on our network. These are cutting-edge and allow for up to 1.6 terabits per second of transport across extremely long distances. 

While these transponders are on Internet2’s roadmap for future deployment, doing our initial testing on the Internet2 backbone with a specific application like FABRIC is helpful. By working closely with Ciena to get them rolled out onto our network, we get to see how they perform and operate on the Internet2 optical platform. This turns into valuable operational experience when it comes time to deploy them across our network — for example, when upgrading bandwidth over the next two to three years to support the North America – Research Education Exchange (NA-REX) platform.

JoAnne: For me, participating in OFCnet is a great way to get excited and recharge professionally. I do a lot of planning and architecture work these days, so OFCnet offers a chance to apply that expertise and experience in a different context. Plus, I get to be hands-on with the equipment we’re deploying — something I don’t get to do as often — and I find it a nice change of pace. 

The community aspect of OFCnet is also really enjoyable. We get to spend time collaborating closely with folks across many organizations, building good working relationships that might not have formed otherwise or would have taken longer to develop.

JoAnne: Helping to build a network from scratch in a couple of days and getting to show it off to the world is pretty exciting. I’m also looking forward to coming home with a head full of possibilities and ideas after exploring the wealth of technology presented at the OFC Exhibit.

If you’re interested in optical networking, quantum networking, or anything related, you should attend OFC at least once. The experience is worth it.