This episode delves into the world of Ciena, a company that plays a crucial role in connecting the world but remains largely unknown to the general public. We speak with CEO Gary Smith about the company's history, its innovative technology (WDM), and its impact on the future of the internet, including the rise of cloud computing and AI. The conversation also explores the complex relationship between industry and infrastructure, the fracturing state of the internet, and the challenges of connecting people across diverse geographical locations and political landscapes.
Today, I’m talking with Gary Smith , CEO of the networking company Ciena . You probably aren’t familiar with Ciena — the company isn’t really a household name. But every internet user has relied on the company’s products; in fact, every internet user has used its products. Ciena makes the hardware and software that make the fiber optic cables that connect the world light up with data.
That’s everything from local fiber networks for broadband ISPs to the massive undersea cables that connect continents. There’s a high probability that this very podcast came to you over a Ciena-powered network, in fact — this company is everywhere. Gary himself is a fascinating character in this story. He joined Ciena in 1997, the year the company had an astonishingly successful IPO in the middle of the dotcom boom. And he became its CEO in 2001, right after the dotcom crash sent the company’s stock price — and the rest of the economy — into a tailspin. So Gary has had a front-row seat to the development of the internet as we know it, and Ciena has been there every step of the way — as telecoms and undersea cables first brought the planet online, all the way to the rise of cloud computing and, now, generative AI. \You’re going to hear Gary and I talk a lot about something called WDM, or Wavelength Division Multiplexing, which is the fundamental technical innovation Ciena is built around. WDM is absolutely key to how the modern internet works, and most people have no idea it exists. The basic idea is that WDM uses multiple wavelengths of light to fit more data onto a single fiber optic cable, which allows those cables to deliver more and more information over time — you’ll hear Gary call it “virtualizing” a fiber optic cable, like you’re turning a single cable into two, or five, or 10. This is obviously hugely important as the world’s internet usage increases and data-hungry applications like streaming video and generative AI ramp up. Ciena didn’t invent WDM, but it was the first company to deploy it commercially in the ’90s — and I wanted to know how Gary was managing his investment in pushing that technology forward and whether he was thinking about the next kind of tech that might disrupt it. I also wanted to know about Ciena’s customers. There are only so many companies building deep sea cables and giant data centers, and it won’t surprise you that the customer set has largely shifted from telecom providers and ISPs to giant cloud computing companies like Meta and Google and Microsoft over the past few years. Just a few months ago, Meta announced it would pay $10 billion to build its own exclusive subsea cable stretching nearly 25,000 miles. Ciena sits right in the middle of that complicated relationship between industry and infrastructure, and I think you’ll find Gary’s perspective to be pretty unique. We also got into the fracturing state of the internet and what it means that people in different geographic locations, dependent on various levels of government control, experience the online world differently. Connecting cables stretching across continents means the people on either end of those cables might have very different ideas about the internet, and Ciena has to take all of that into account. See, I’m guessing you didn’t know about Ciena before, but almost every single Decoder idea is right here, sitting on the backbone of the internet. Okay, Ciena CEO Gary Smith. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Gary Smith, you’re the CEO of Ciena. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. Good to be here. I am very excited to talk to you. The Decoder team and I were talking earlier about how we love stories of hidden companies that run the world, and Ciena very much feels like one of those companies. It is a huge player in networking. It’s a huge player in the future of our networks. There’s some AI to talk about. There’s undersea cables to talk about, which is always fun. Quickly, for everyone, describe what Ciena is and what you do. Basically, Ciena is the leading technology company in the world for providing high-speed connectivity. So if you think about all the networks that have been enabled around the internet and around the world, or, as you alluded to, submarine cables, Ciena is really the driving force behind that high-speed technology. Even with mobile connectivity, terrestrial connectivity, and submarine cable connectivity, we’re basically the best in the world at moving optical bits. I always think about it as two internets, right? There’s the internet we experience — the digital internet — and then there’s the physical internet: the actual cables and wires that connect our networks together and connect us togethe
Ciena Internet Infrastructure WDM Wavelength Division Multiplexing Gary Smith Cloud Computing AI Submarine Cables Networking Connectivity
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