Power Consumption Considerations in Metro Optical Networks#

Steve Jones (Unicorn Farmer)

• Why: Optical transport power draw is becoming a hard constraint in DC and metro builds — pluggable choices, coherent DSPs, and port counts all trade against watts per bit. This pairs naturally with the 800G transceiver talk and the AI-DC power talk in the same program.
• What: A look at the growing power needs of a metro optical network and the options available to mitigate them. This abstract is unusually thin — the program text literally says "Draft Powerpoint presentation attached," with the page summary adding only that it covers mitigation options — so expect an experienced-operator perspective piece rather than a paper (from abstract only).
• How: Not described in the program material; based on the speaker's background this is expected to be a practitioner's walkthrough of where the power goes in a metro optical plant and what levers exist.
• Where applicable: Metro/regional optical operators and anyone building DC-to-metro interconnects. Org-agnostic in principle, but with so little published detail, judge the talk on delivery.