Bandwidth-intensive applications such as cloud computing, video, file transfer and online gaming are driving a transformation in the core network. Service providers must cost effectively deliver the increased bandwidth and low latency needed for these new services and they must be capable of provisioning new services quickly and with high resiliency to meet evolving consumer and business needs. To accomplish this, service providers are transitioning to richer mesh network topologies with a photonics core, and adopting digital coherent transponder technology as a single scalable technology for core network applications. Coherent transponders such as Oclaro's MI 5000XM are critical components of these mesh networks because they offer a reliable and cost-effective way of encoding large amounts of data into light-signals needed to flow through the photonics core and then decoding the light signals at the connection end point.