If you can't beat 'em…

While equipment vendor Ciena does not make optical electrical components for the open market, the company does make its own fiber bragg gratings and thin film filters. Ciena began making fiber bragg gratings on its own about six years ago, pretty much out of necessity, says Jean Luc Archambault, director of passive components for Ciena.

“When we started our business, there were no viable suppliers of fiber bragg gratings so we were forced to develop our own technology. It's really paid off because we've been able to stay ahead of the curve in terms of channel density,” Archambault says. “We've been shipping 50 GHz channel spacings ahead of — and longer than — anyone else. And we are also developing 25 and 12.5 GHz channel spacing using our own [fiber bragg grating] technology.”

Ciena added thin film filters to its optical electrical components shop in the third quarter of 2000 because they have been so hard to get on a timely basis from the handful of companies that make them. Over the past year, the wait for custom thin film filters has been approximately three to four months. With its own manufacturing capability, Ciena can go through the whole development cycle in a week, Archambault says.

In general, lead times for hard-to-get optical electrical components were running at the normal six to eight weeks in 1995. Those lead times doubled to nine months in 1996 and doubled again to 18 months by 1998. Today those same products take 12 to 18 months to deliver, says Stephen Montgomery, president of ElectroniCast. The major components buyers aren't helping the situation much, either. They are “eating up the supply and leaving no room for anyone else to get anything,” he says.