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The Echo of Wi-Fi: Why the Optics Industry Feels Like Déjà Vu
There was a time in the late ‘90s when the first dot-com boom was underway, mobile phones were going mainstream, and personal computers were finally becoming portable. But the internet was still a physical destination. It was a place you went to, a connected desktop in a home, office, or internet café, not a parallel universe you could access on the go.
I started my career in the trenches, developing some of the industry’s first 802.11 (Wi-Fi) transceivers. Looking back, Wi-Fi wasn’t so much a technology breakthrough as it was an inevitable response to a shift in human behavior. We wanted to communicate. We wanted access to the riches of the internet. We wanted our computers. And we wanted them with us, all the time.
It was a chaotic, fragmented, loud and wildly innovative time. We had proprietary “Turbo Modes,” one-upmanship, conflicting standards, and dozens of startups and few “grown up” companies, claiming they owned the future. But eventually, and rapidly, an ecosystem developed that transformed Wi-Fi from a novelty into an essential utility, sitting beside water and electricity, within 20 years. There was an explosive catalyst, a gold rush, and an eventual consolidation around standards.
Today, as I watch the optics industry in 2026, I can’t help but feel the same electric hum in the air. The same fragmentation. The same confusion. The same catalytic force. The same gold-rush energy. The same inevitability that something is about to happen, must happen, to enable the latest seismic shift in human behavior.
If you squint your eyes, it almost looks like 2003 all over again…
When the Wi-Fi Ecosystem Learned to Grow the Pie Together
What’s often forgotten about early Wi-Fi is that its success was not inevitable. Wireless is a shared medium. There is no such thing as a private RF universe. Interference, broken roaming, competing beam forming mechanisms, and failed interoperability didn’t just hurt competitors, it damaged customer trust in the entire category. If Wi-Fi was unreliable, it wouldn’t matter who had the fastest radio. The market itself would be dead on arrival.
That realization changed behavior. Through a few painful stumbles, the industry learned that there had to be a common baseline, a set of rules everyone followed, to keep the air clean and the experience predictable. Differentiation still mattered, but it had to be built on top of a shared foundation, not at its expense.
Competitors worked together. Standards bodies matured. Interoperability test beds emerged. Certification programs enforced compliance and guardrails. Vendors argued fiercely, but within boundaries that preserved the viability of the ecosystem. It wasn’t altruism. It was survival. Grow the pie first, then fight like hell for your share of it.
This ecosystem balance only worked because the cast of characters was diverse, and complementary. There were large, established players acting as the adults in the room, setting expectations around enterprise reliability, security, and scale. There were aggressive startups injecting energy, new ideas, and technical breakthroughs that pushed the state of the art forward. And there was Intel.
Intel wanted to make mobile computing inevitable. Creating a new, fast-growing category for higher-margin mobile processors was simply good business. But Intel did something unprecedented: it put its own balance sheet behind the ecosystem. A $300 million Centrino marketing campaign, unheard of at the time, made Wi-Fi synonymous with mobility, reliability, and interoperability. It was a spark that turned momentum into a conflagration.
Intel wasn’t alone. Cisco built enterprise-grade wireless networks that IT could trust. Microsoft pulled wireless deep into the operating system, normalizing it for developers and users alike. Dell and other OEMs made Wi-Fi table stakes in mobile computing. The ecosystem had champions. It had shepherds. And it had plenty of unruly sheep. Together, that unlikely combination produced one of the most successful infrastructure transitions in modern technology history.
Wi-Fi didn’t win because one company dominated early. It won because enough powerful players decided, independently, and selfishly, that growing the pie together mattered more than grabbing the biggest slice first.
When Optics Stopped Being Predictable Plumbing
For a long time, optics was boring, in the best possible way. Optical networking was reliable, predictable, and largely invisible. Bandwidth increased on a steady cadence. Power budgets were understood. Distances were fixed. Traffic patterns were well behaved. As long as you followed the playbook, the system worked.
10G became 25G became 40G became 100G became 400G. Roadmaps were clear. Margins were thin but stable. Optics was foundational, but rarely strategic.
Then AI broke the playbook.
The rise of large language models, agentic systems, and massive multi-modal workloads are driving an insatiable demand for compute, that simply does not fit inside traditional data center assumptions. Training and inference push processing density, east–west bandwidth, and latency sensitivity into entirely uncharted territory.
Clusters no longer scale in a single dimension. They scale up, packing more compute into a rack. They scale out, spreading workloads across rows and halls. And increasingly, they scale across, connecting multiple data centers into a single logical system.
At each step, the network had to keep pace. Exceptionally expensive GPUs cannot sit idle waiting for data. As clusters stretch across racks, buildings, and campuses, the network stops being a background transport and becomes a gating factor for utilization, determinism, and overall system efficiency.
Then the industry hit a power wall.
The constraint is no longer real estate or fiber, it is megawatts. New data centers are being built where power is available, not where latency is optimal and convenient. And that power constraint applies to everything: compute, switching, cooling, and optics alike.
The result is a mandate optics has never faced before, and must now satisfy simultaneously:
1. Dramatically increase compute scale.
2. Deliver higher speed and tighter determinism so GPUs never wait.
3. Reduce power consumption per bit, per port, per rack, per data center.
That combination changes optics from predictable plumbing into a first-order architectural constraint.
Copper interconnects, once “good enough,” are becoming a barrier at scale. Signal integrity, power loss, and reach limits are no longer theoretical, they are operational. Co-packaged optics, long discussed in labs and roadmaps, are now moving into real deployments, bringing optics closer to switch silicon and reducing copper distances and power consumption. Pluggable optics no longer monopolize the design space. Optical switching is re-emerging not as an experiment, but as a necessity.
In this world, optics stops being plumbing. It becomes both the limiting factor and the enabling force of AI infrastructure.
The Return of Chaos (and Opportunity)
Just like early Wi-Fi, this shift triggers a burst of simultaneous, multi-vector innovation.
Startups attack every layer at once: new modulation schemes, novel laser technologies, co-packaged optics, disaggregated control planes, fiber automation, thermal management, and power-aware networking. Incumbents are forced to re-architect product lines that were stable for a decade. Conferences fill with competing visions, overlapping claims, and incompatible approaches.
It feels chaotic. Because it is. But once again, chaos is not a failure mode, it is a signal that the industry is very much alive.
And once again, chaos requires gravity. In the AI era, NVIDIA plays the role Intel once did. Again, not out of altruism, but out of self-interest. NVIDIA’s GPUs, interconnect requirements, and system architectures now define the shape of modern AI clusters. Their need for scale, efficiency, and determinism forces the entire optical ecosystem to evolve faster than it otherwise would. Like Intel with Centrino, NVIDIA is pushing the levers that expand the market, because doing so directly expands its own opportunity.
The hyperscalers are doing the same. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are committing tens of billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure capable of supporting agentic workloads at planetary scale. They are willing to fund new architectures, absorb early inefficiencies, and accept real risk to break through existing limits.
Why the Optics Landscape Feels So Familiar
If this all feels strangely familiar, it should.
Fragmentation? Check. The optics industry today looks a lot like Wi-Fi did in the early 2000s; fragmented, noisy, and bursting with parallel innovation. Dozens of companies are attacking adjacent problems simultaneously: DSPs, lasers, co-packaged optics, thermal management, fiber automation, disaggregated control planes. No single approach has emerged as “the” answer, and that uncertainty is driving experimentation in every direction at once.
Intellectual chaos? Check. The intellectual chaos is unmistakable. Conferences are filled with competing visions and overlapping claims, with multiple companies promising order-of-magnitude breakthroughs through fundamentally different architectures. Wi-Fi went through the same debates, MIMO, MU-MIMO, interference with incumbent RF systems, number of streams, multiple versions of beamforming, proprietary turbo modes vs standards. None of those questions had clean answers at the time, and optics is no different today.
Massive funding inflows? Check. A gravitational pull toward consolidation? Absolutely.
Capital is flowing freely, another familiar signal. Investors and operators alike sense that optics is no longer incremental plumbing; it’s a breakout category with strategic importance. That gravitational pull inevitably leads toward consolidation. We saw this clearly with Marvell’s recent acquisition of Celestial.ai, a move that signals the era of standalone components is ending. Just as Wi-Fi eventually centered around a small number of dominant silicon platforms, optics will likely converge around a handful of dominant players who can integrate those disjointed innovations into a platform.
And most importantly: a forcing function? YES! Wi-Fi needed to cut the wire, then work in dense deployments, then enable low-power IoT, and now act more deterministically to power our agentic future.
Optics needs to make AI scale physically possible; within switches, across racks, across data centers, without collapsing the grid that feeds it.
When a market has a forcing function, it must evolve. There is no choice.
What Wi-Fi Can Teach Optics About the Road Ahead
We’ve seen this movie before, and Wi-Fi left behind a few hard-earned lessons that optics would be wise to absorb.
Lesson 1: Standards and Interoperability always win — even when it's messy.
Never bet against Ethernet and never bet against Wi-Fi. Proprietary performance advantages are tempting early on, but shared infrastructure lives or dies by common language. Great compromises in the days of 802.11g and 802.11n brought the industry together and left proprietary turbo modes as window dressing for the retail market. Coopetition flourished and the winners were those who embraced it. Optics will face the same tradeoffs, and the ecosystems that prioritize interoperability early will ultimately outlast those that don’t.
Lesson 2: The market rewards companies that grow the pie.
Intel didn’t sell access point silicon. Microsoft didn’t sell radios. Dell didn’t care which chipset won; they bought from everyone. What they all cared about was expanding the market itself. Their success came from making Wi-Fi inevitable, not exclusive. Optics needs its own version of that mindset.
Lesson 3: Simplification beats elegance.
Wi-Fi became ubiquitous not because it solved the RF problem perfectly, but because it made the technology easy for millions of people to deploy. Optics is approaching a similar inflection point. Operators aren’t asking for more clever architectures; they’re asking how to deploy across dozens of data centers, manage thermal and power budgets, automate fiber paths with fewer humans in the loop. Elegance helps, but simplification wins.
Lesson 4: The winners are ecosystem players.
The most successful Wi-Fi companies didn’t just ship chips; they built platforms. Reference designs, SDKs, certification programs, developer ecosystems, and trusted brands mattered as much as raw performance. Optics now has the same opportunity, but only if the industry thinks beyond feeds, speeds, and component optimization.
Where Optics Goes From Here
If the analogy holds, and I believe it does, then optics is entering a decade defined by startup energy, vendor consolidation, architectural standardization, and deep vertical integration. Complexity will be abstracted away. New platforms will emerge. The conversation will shift from components to systems, and eventually to experiences.
The companies that win won’t just be the fastest or the most clever. They’ll be the ones that make optics predictable, operable, and trustworthy at scale. They’ll lean into interoperability before the market forces it. They’ll treat power, cooling, and fiber as software problems. They’ll partner with kingmakers rather than trying to outmuscle them.
And most importantly, they won’t try to own the whole pie. They’ll grow it.
Because every major networking revolution, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, cloud, and now AI fabrics, follows the same arc: breakthrough, fragmentation, chaos, consolidation, and ubiquity. Optics is squarely in the fragmentation and chaos phase.
That’s not a bug. It’s the signal that the industry is alive again.
Conclusion: The Déjà Vu Is Real
When I sit in modern AI datacenters and look at the optical racks, I feel the same thing I felt holding a pre-standard 802.11g PCMCIA card in 2002:
“We don’t fully know what we’re building yet, but when we do, it will reshape the entire industry.”
Wi-Fi unlocked mobility. Optics will unlock AI at scale. And just like Wi-Fi, the winners won’t be the ones who optimize a component in isolation. They’ll be the ones who understand that ecosystems, not components, determine the future.
There was a time in the late ‘90s when the first dot-com boom was underway, mobile phones were going mainstream, and personal computers were finally becoming portable. But the internet was still a physical destination. It was a place you went to, a connected desktop in a home, office, or internet café, not a parallel universe you could access on the go.
I started my career in the trenches, developing some of the industry’s first 802.11 (Wi-Fi) transceivers. Looking back, Wi-Fi wasn’t so much a technology breakthrough as it was an inevitable response to a shift in human behavior. We wanted to communicate. We wanted access to the riches of the internet. We wanted our computers. And we wanted them with us, all the time.
It was a chaotic, fragmented, loud and wildly innovative time. We had proprietary “Turbo Modes,” one-upmanship, conflicting standards, and dozens of startups and few “grown up” companies, claiming they owned the future. But eventually, and rapidly, an ecosystem developed that transformed Wi-Fi from a novelty into an essential utility, sitting beside water and electricity, within 20 years. There was an explosive catalyst, a gold rush, and an eventual consolidation around standards.
Today, as I watch the optics industry in 2026, I can’t help but feel the same electric hum in the air. The same fragmentation. The same confusion. The same catalytic force. The same gold-rush energy. The same inevitability that something is about to happen, must happen, to enable the latest seismic shift in human behavior.
If you squint your eyes, it almost looks like 2003 all over again…
When the Wi-Fi Ecosystem Learned to Grow the Pie Together
What’s often forgotten about early Wi-Fi is that its success was not inevitable. Wireless is a shared medium. There is no such thing as a private RF universe. Interference, broken roaming, competing beam forming mechanisms, and failed interoperability didn’t just hurt competitors, it damaged customer trust in the entire category. If Wi-Fi was unreliable, it wouldn’t matter who had the fastest radio. The market itself would be dead on arrival.
That realization changed behavior. Through a few painful stumbles, the industry learned that there had to be a common baseline, a set of rules everyone followed, to keep the air clean and the experience predictable. Differentiation still mattered, but it had to be built on top of a shared foundation, not at its expense.
Competitors worked together. Standards bodies matured. Interoperability test beds emerged. Certification programs enforced compliance and guardrails. Vendors argued fiercely, but within boundaries that preserved the viability of the ecosystem. It wasn’t altruism. It was survival. Grow the pie first, then fight like hell for your share of it.
This ecosystem balance only worked because the cast of characters was diverse, and complementary. There were large, established players acting as the adults in the room, setting expectations around enterprise reliability, security, and scale. There were aggressive startups injecting energy, new ideas, and technical breakthroughs that pushed the state of the art forward. And there was Intel.
Intel wanted to make mobile computing inevitable. Creating a new, fast-growing category for higher-margin mobile processors was simply good business. But Intel did something unprecedented: it put its own balance sheet behind the ecosystem. A $300 million Centrino marketing campaign, unheard of at the time, made Wi-Fi synonymous with mobility, reliability, and interoperability. It was a spark that turned momentum into a conflagration.
Intel wasn’t alone. Cisco built enterprise-grade wireless networks that IT could trust. Microsoft pulled wireless deep into the operating system, normalizing it for developers and users alike. Dell and other OEMs made Wi-Fi table stakes in mobile computing. The ecosystem had champions. It had shepherds. And it had plenty of unruly sheep. Together, that unlikely combination produced one of the most successful infrastructure transitions in modern technology history.
Wi-Fi didn’t win because one company dominated early. It won because enough powerful players decided, independently, and selfishly, that growing the pie together mattered more than grabbing the biggest slice first.
When Optics Stopped Being Predictable Plumbing
For a long time, optics was boring, in the best possible way. Optical networking was reliable, predictable, and largely invisible. Bandwidth increased on a steady cadence. Power budgets were understood. Distances were fixed. Traffic patterns were well behaved. As long as you followed the playbook, the system worked.
10G became 25G became 40G became 100G became 400G. Roadmaps were clear. Margins were thin but stable. Optics was foundational, but rarely strategic.
Then AI broke the playbook.
The rise of large language models, agentic systems, and massive multi-modal workloads are driving an insatiable demand for compute, that simply does not fit inside traditional data center assumptions. Training and inference push processing density, east–west bandwidth, and latency sensitivity into entirely uncharted territory.
Clusters no longer scale in a single dimension. They scale up, packing more compute into a rack. They scale out, spreading workloads across rows and halls. And increasingly, they scale across, connecting multiple data centers into a single logical system.
At each step, the network had to keep pace. Exceptionally expensive GPUs cannot sit idle waiting for data. As clusters stretch across racks, buildings, and campuses, the network stops being a background transport and becomes a gating factor for utilization, determinism, and overall system efficiency.
Then the industry hit a power wall.
The constraint is no longer real estate or fiber, it is megawatts. New data centers are being built where power is available, not where latency is optimal and convenient. And that power constraint applies to everything: compute, switching, cooling, and optics alike.
The result is a mandate optics has never faced before, and must now satisfy simultaneously:
1. Dramatically increase compute scale.
2. Deliver higher speed and tighter determinism so GPUs never wait.
3. Reduce power consumption per bit, per port, per rack, per data center.
That combination changes optics from predictable plumbing into a first-order architectural constraint.
Copper interconnects, once “good enough,” are becoming a barrier at scale. Signal integrity, power loss, and reach limits are no longer theoretical, they are operational. Co-packaged optics, long discussed in labs and roadmaps, are now moving into real deployments, bringing optics closer to switch silicon and reducing copper distances and power consumption. Pluggable optics no longer monopolize the design space. Optical switching is re-emerging not as an experiment, but as a necessity.
In this world, optics stops being plumbing. It becomes both the limiting factor and the enabling force of AI infrastructure.
The Return of Chaos (and Opportunity)
Just like early Wi-Fi, this shift triggers a burst of simultaneous, multi-vector innovation.
Startups attack every layer at once: new modulation schemes, novel laser technologies, co-packaged optics, disaggregated control planes, fiber automation, thermal management, and power-aware networking. Incumbents are forced to re-architect product lines that were stable for a decade. Conferences fill with competing visions, overlapping claims, and incompatible approaches.
It feels chaotic. Because it is. But once again, chaos is not a failure mode, it is a signal that the industry is very much alive.
And once again, chaos requires gravity. In the AI era, NVIDIA plays the role Intel once did. Again, not out of altruism, but out of self-interest. NVIDIA’s GPUs, interconnect requirements, and system architectures now define the shape of modern AI clusters. Their need for scale, efficiency, and determinism forces the entire optical ecosystem to evolve faster than it otherwise would. Like Intel with Centrino, NVIDIA is pushing the levers that expand the market, because doing so directly expands its own opportunity.
The hyperscalers are doing the same. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are committing tens of billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure capable of supporting agentic workloads at planetary scale. They are willing to fund new architectures, absorb early inefficiencies, and accept real risk to break through existing limits.
Why the Optics Landscape Feels So Familiar
If this all feels strangely familiar, it should.
Fragmentation? Check. The optics industry today looks a lot like Wi-Fi did in the early 2000s; fragmented, noisy, and bursting with parallel innovation. Dozens of companies are attacking adjacent problems simultaneously: DSPs, lasers, co-packaged optics, thermal management, fiber automation, disaggregated control planes. No single approach has emerged as “the” answer, and that uncertainty is driving experimentation in every direction at once.
Intellectual chaos? Check. The intellectual chaos is unmistakable. Conferences are filled with competing visions and overlapping claims, with multiple companies promising order-of-magnitude breakthroughs through fundamentally different architectures. Wi-Fi went through the same debates, MIMO, MU-MIMO, interference with incumbent RF systems, number of streams, multiple versions of beamforming, proprietary turbo modes vs standards. None of those questions had clean answers at the time, and optics is no different today.
Massive funding inflows? Check. A gravitational pull toward consolidation? Absolutely.
Capital is flowing freely, another familiar signal. Investors and operators alike sense that optics is no longer incremental plumbing; it’s a breakout category with strategic importance. That gravitational pull inevitably leads toward consolidation. We saw this clearly with Marvell’s recent acquisition of Celestial.ai, a move that signals the era of standalone components is ending. Just as Wi-Fi eventually centered around a small number of dominant silicon platforms, optics will likely converge around a handful of dominant players who can integrate those disjointed innovations into a platform.
And most importantly: a forcing function? YES! Wi-Fi needed to cut the wire, then work in dense deployments, then enable low-power IoT, and now act more deterministically to power our agentic future.
Optics needs to make AI scale physically possible; within switches, across racks, across data centers, without collapsing the grid that feeds it.
When a market has a forcing function, it must evolve. There is no choice.
What Wi-Fi Can Teach Optics About the Road Ahead
We’ve seen this movie before, and Wi-Fi left behind a few hard-earned lessons that optics would be wise to absorb.
Lesson 1: Standards and Interoperability always win — even when it's messy.
Never bet against Ethernet and never bet against Wi-Fi. Proprietary performance advantages are tempting early on, but shared infrastructure lives or dies by common language. Great compromises in the days of 802.11g and 802.11n brought the industry together and left proprietary turbo modes as window dressing for the retail market. Coopetition flourished and the winners were those who embraced it. Optics will face the same tradeoffs, and the ecosystems that prioritize interoperability early will ultimately outlast those that don’t.
Lesson 2: The market rewards companies that grow the pie.
Intel didn’t sell access point silicon. Microsoft didn’t sell radios. Dell didn’t care which chipset won; they bought from everyone. What they all cared about was expanding the market itself. Their success came from making Wi-Fi inevitable, not exclusive. Optics needs its own version of that mindset.
Lesson 3: Simplification beats elegance.
Wi-Fi became ubiquitous not because it solved the RF problem perfectly, but because it made the technology easy for millions of people to deploy. Optics is approaching a similar inflection point. Operators aren’t asking for more clever architectures; they’re asking how to deploy across dozens of data centers, manage thermal and power budgets, automate fiber paths with fewer humans in the loop. Elegance helps, but simplification wins.
Lesson 4: The winners are ecosystem players.
The most successful Wi-Fi companies didn’t just ship chips; they built platforms. Reference designs, SDKs, certification programs, developer ecosystems, and trusted brands mattered as much as raw performance. Optics now has the same opportunity, but only if the industry thinks beyond feeds, speeds, and component optimization.
Where Optics Goes From Here
If the analogy holds, and I believe it does, then optics is entering a decade defined by startup energy, vendor consolidation, architectural standardization, and deep vertical integration. Complexity will be abstracted away. New platforms will emerge. The conversation will shift from components to systems, and eventually to experiences.
The companies that win won’t just be the fastest or the most clever. They’ll be the ones that make optics predictable, operable, and trustworthy at scale. They’ll lean into interoperability before the market forces it. They’ll treat power, cooling, and fiber as software problems. They’ll partner with kingmakers rather than trying to outmuscle them.
And most importantly, they won’t try to own the whole pie. They’ll grow it.
Because every major networking revolution, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, cloud, and now AI fabrics, follows the same arc: breakthrough, fragmentation, chaos, consolidation, and ubiquity. Optics is squarely in the fragmentation and chaos phase.
That’s not a bug. It’s the signal that the industry is alive again.
Conclusion: The Déjà Vu Is Real
When I sit in modern AI datacenters and look at the optical racks, I feel the same thing I felt holding a pre-standard 802.11g PCMCIA card in 2002:
“We don’t fully know what we’re building yet, but when we do, it will reshape the entire industry.”
Wi-Fi unlocked mobility. Optics will unlock AI at scale. And just like Wi-Fi, the winners won’t be the ones who optimize a component in isolation. They’ll be the ones who understand that ecosystems, not components, determine the future.
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