April 13, 2025, PacketLight is an Israeli optical transmission equipment company that has been in business for 25 years. The editor has interviewed them several times before and has always been interested in this small but wonderful company. This year, the editor was invited again to interview them at the OFC, and it happened that their PL-8000M 2x800G Muxponder product won the 2025 Lightwave+BTR Innovative Product Award. A group of expert judges from the optical communication field gave their product a high score of 4.0.
Simply put, the PL-8000M Muxponder is a 1U-sized optical transmission device in the AI era, based on an 800G pluggable OpenROADM coherent optical module, and it supports various services ranging from 100GbE to 1.6Tbps. This is PacketLight's first 800G product. Just one month before the OFC, they also announced that they, together with Fujitsu Optical Components, had achieved the mixed service transmission of 100GbE and 400GbE based on the 800G wavelength.
In the winner-takes-all optical transmission market, what enables a small company to survive tenaciously and keep developing? The editor asked this question again to Koby Reshef, the CEO of PacketLight. Mr. Reshef told the editor that this year marks the 25th anniversary of the company's establishment. Over the past 25 years, what has helped PacketLight grow all the way is the world of mouth, differentiated customers, cost-effective products, and continuous innovation.
The 25 years of PacketLight are also the 25 years during which the optical transmission market has undergone great changes. The transmission technology has transformed from simple SDH to DWDM&OTN, the market has expanded from a single operator market to more industries, and the number of suppliers has reduced a lot. Several leading companies have occupied most of the market share. Mr. Reshef said that in terms of products, PacketLight has always been making devices like pizza boxes. With the progress of transmission technology, their devices have achieved more and more functions within a 1U size, and there is no longer a need to use an entire rack of equipment to complete the required functions. More importantly, their devices integrate network monitoring functions such as OTDR, introduce physical layer encryption, and even quantum distributed key encryption (QKD). They support various transmission standards such as OTN, Ethernet, and Fibre Channel, and can be equipped with EDFA, Raman amplifiers, and ROADM. Reshef told the editor that although their company is small, they have a large variety of products, and the secret to their survival and development is that they can act faster than large companies. It is precisely because of this that they have had many OEM cooperation opportunities with some large companies in the transmission field over the years.
With PacketLight CEO Koby Reshef on OFC2025
In terms of customer selection, Mr. Reshef told the editor that PacketLight's target customers are those second-tier and third-tier operators, as well as enterprise users such as banks and financial institutions. The support for Fibre Channel technology and advanced physical layer encryption technology have made their devices favored by many enterprise-level customers. The editor discussed with Reshef whether the enterprise-level optical transmission market has risen in recent years, and he gave an affirmative answer. In this market, the characteristics of low cost, security, and flexibility of PacketLight's devices have enabled them to win the choices of users around the world. Let's take a look at the star device PL-8000M again. PacketLight said that this device can support a pay-as-you-grow architecture, ensure future-proof scalability. It supports standard optical modules interfaces for the 100GbE, 400GbE and 800GbE services, and Layer-1 GCM-AES-256 encryption for secure communications, as well as QKD.
Mr. Reshef told the editor that he has been to China several times. He really hopes that PacketLight can sell its products in China. However, to enter the Chinese market, it is necessary to first obtain the equipment network access permission from the Chinese government, and more importantly, to face many powerful competitors in the Chinese market. For this matter, after returning to China, the editor also specifically went to Hangzhou to communicate with some companies that also produce transmission equipment. In their opinion, it is not only a matter of price. Currently, the exclusion of imported equipment by Chinese state-owned enterprise users will also affect the sales prospects of PacketLight's products in the Chinese market. However, anyway, the burgeoning DCI market is PacketLight's strength and will also be their opportunity in China. Currently, this market has not been fully opened up due to factors such as fiber deployment policies and the monopoly of some large companies, but PacketLight's DCI deployment experience around the world will be very valuable.
A quarter of a century has passed, and PacketLight is still a small but wonderful company. Their slogan is "Grow Your Network with us Using OTN&DWDM Equipment". Although they are small in scale, the company's products, market, and vision are not small. They are a microcosm of the optical transmission market over the past 25 years and will also welcome their own opportunities in the new market pattern of the optical transmission field.
