Pune-based optical fiber provider Sterlite Tech has announced a collaboration with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to develop an optical transport controller. This controller will be designed to manage and control the Voyager and Cassini transponders, which are open and disaggregated packet/optical transponders developed by members of TIP’s Open Optical and Packet Transport (OOPT) project.
Voyager, originally designed by Facebook and now evolving under Adva Optical with Cumulus Networks software, and Cassini, a white box transponder from Edgecore Networks, are key components of TIP’s OOPT initiative aimed at promoting open and disaggregated optical networks. Cassini integrates 100GbE switching with Layer-1 optical transport functions, suitable for data center interconnect, metro, and access backhaul applications.
Sterlite Tech’s contribution will be an open optical transport controller, along with a virtualized application for managing the data plane on these platforms. This controller will be contributed to the TIP community, furthering the collaborative nature of the project.
Ayush Sharma, Head of Programmable Networking and Intelligence at Sterlite Tech, emphasized the importance of optical networks as the foundation of operator transport infrastructure. He explained that while traditional vendor-specific solutions offer controller functions, they are typically proprietary. In contrast, an open optical transport controller becomes hardware agnostic, and open interfaces enable programmability. This approach allows telecommunications companies to select components from various vendors, as long as they adhere to open community standards, fostering greater flexibility and choice in building their networks.
TIP’s OOPT project aims to standardize packet optical interfaces and promote the adoption of disaggregated transport platforms by creating open DWDM solutions, models, and APIs for transponders, open line systems, and routers. This collaboration between Sterlite Tech and TIP is a step towards making optical transport networks more open and programmable.
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