“New” optical technology
This CBC News article (broken link removed) discusses Nortel’s plans for ‘new’ optical technology. In it, the president of Nortel’s Metro Ethernet division confirms they are “seeing significant demands for bandwidth.” [Update: 22 October 2009, the news article has been removed from the CBC web site. For an alternate version of the same story, visit this page.]
Also, he uses a phrase “hyper-connectivity, where every device that should be connected to the network, will be connected, the staggering bandwidth demands will only continue upwards.”
These statements confirm and would concur with what I see in the marketplace. And yet, they’re also misleading to a point.
What the article doesn’t mention is that this technology has actually been around for a long time. It’s been held back so that the duopoly (phone & cable cos) can figure out how to make the most money using their closed network business model.
What the article also doesn’t tell you is that this technology is targeted at operators’ – an industry word for phone and cable company – core network, not the edge, which is where the real problem is. This infrastructure, the copper phone wires and coaxial TV cable coming into people’s homes and businesses, is simply not adequate. It was never designed to handle the “current industry top standard of 10 gigabytes per second.”
Next time you have a chance, ask the folks at your local phone or cable company what their plans are to deliver 10 gigabits to your home and business.
Yes, bandwidth is exploding. All the duopoly is doing is making it cheaper for themselves to move all these bits around inside their network. They’re still not doing anything to give you and me decent bandwidth at a reasonable price.