The optical networking industry is growing, but it's doing it in fits and starts. If you took optical component specialist Oclaro (Nasdaq: OCLR) as a proxy for the industry, you'd think that copper-based networking was the next big thing. But JDS Uniphase (Nasdaq: JDSU) just showed us that this is far from the truth.

In its first-quarter report last night, JDS showed some muscle with 36% year-over-year sales growth and five times fatter non-GAAP earnings per share. Gross margins expanded by nearly 2 percentage points from last quarter. There's a slight slowdown going on in the testing equipment division, but hefty sales in the optical components segment more than made up for it.

Now that we have up-to-date reports from Oclaro, Oplink Communications (Nasdaq: OPLK), and JDS, I think we can arrive at the conclusion that Oclaro's problems are unique to Oclaro. Neither Oplink nor JDS saw anything like the order drop-off Oclaro reported, and though we're still weeks away from a Finisar (Nasdaq: FNSR) update, it looks like the overall market for optical networking remains strong.

The JDS report was impressive enough to keep the stock rising on a generally down market day, and it also seems to have pulled some of the competition up by the bootstraps. Optical switch specialist Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) is up by nearly 2% on no significant news of its own, and Finisar is soaring as high as 6.8% on nothing but JDS' report. That makes sense because it's the one major competitor in the space that hasn't yet reported earnings this season, and investors are drawing a deep sigh of relief to see others doing well.

Is this a great time to buy optical networkers on the cheap, or is JDS pointing us in the wrong direction? Discuss in the comments below.