And so to Vienna for the 35th year of ECOC, which is billed — quite rightly in my view — as the leading optical networking event in Europe. Personal highlights from last year included the post-deadline paper from Alcatel-Lucent and Draka, which reported 40 Gbit/s transmission over transoceanic distances for the first time, JDSU’s photonic integrated amplifier, and Rod Alferness’ plenary lecture on predictions for the next 10 years of telecoms. I’m sure 2009 will provide a similar combination of interesting technical results, innovative new product announcements, and insightful debate on the future of optical networking technology. In short, pure heaven for technophiles like me.

But while rejoicing in our love of technology, can we ignore the fact that since last year the world has become gripped by a recession deeper than anything seen before in our lifetimes? In my view, we can’t afford to. As an fledgling reporter it was drummed into me that there are always three aspects to every idea: technology, money and people. In the context of ECOC, technology and the sharing of ideas (“communication” in the personal sense) are the event’s raison d’etre; that’s two out of three covered. But when it comes to money, how does it all fit together?

Here’s a cautionary tale: at the time of writing the vendor with the most optical networking market share doesn’t have an announced 100 Gbit/s field trial; while the vendor with the most 100 Gbit/s field trials, is currently reorganizing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and looks unlikely to survive as a stand-alone company. Industry analyst Mark Lum, who originally pointed out this odd juxtaposition of circumstances, is quick to add that there is no cause and effect going on here. Nevertheless, this goes to show that having the best technology is no guarantee of financial reward.

Of course, cause and effect do tend to operate more reliably in the other direction — there does need to be investment in R&D to secure the future of a business. For the optical components community, which has been working hard to build viable businesses after the tech crash of the early 2000s, the credit crisis could not have come at a worse time. Many optical components and equipment vendors are still struggling with difficult balance sheets, thin product margins, and risk-averse CFOs, all of which can put the squeeze on R&D spending.

A recent report from the OECD confirmed what we perhaps feared in our hearts: that innovation is already under threat. Historically, business R&D spending and patent filings have moved in parallel with GDP, slowing markedly during the economic downturns of the early 1990s and early 2000s. Recent evidence, based on corporate reports from the first quarter of 2009, confirms this is happening again, with R&D spending declining in many cases. US venture capital investments plunged 60% in the first quarter of 2009 and the same is true in Europe and in China. Patent applications are down. What now?

But while the recession will undoubtedly change the world, it is not the end. One bright spot is the research and education community, which seems to display a certain amount of “crisis immunity” — probably due to the fact that their focus is on the potential value of technology, rather than simply revenue generation.

As a result, R&D decision makers in the education sector are more eager to try “bleeding edge” technologies in order to assess their usefulness. In fact, a project leader from the Czech research and education network CESNET told me that if they didn’t deploy the latest kit then they wouldn’t get the funding. Hence CESNET was one of the first outfits to operate a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) enabled network in Europe. Similarly, the UK research network JANET was one of the first to test and deploy 40 Gbit/s wavelengths in collaboration with Nortel. These kind of efforts help new technologies gain acceptance.

What’s more, academic R&D funding is typically planned on longer timescales than vendor budgets. Within Europe CELTIC is a unique organization that brings together service providers, manufacturers, universities and research institutions to fulfil short to medium-term research goals relating to telecoms (the moniker stands for Cooperation for a sustained European Leadership in Telecommunications). The total budget that has been defined for CELTIC between 2004 and 2011 is €1 billion, a number that has not been impacted by recent economic uncertainty.

Collaboration between industry and academia is nothing new of course. When universities and research institution select the topics on which to perform fundamental research, industrial roadmaps frequently play a role. Conversely, optical vendors can often secure European or national grant funding by working with an academic partner. But the recession looks set to push collaboration to new levels.

While industrial R&D budgets may be feeling the pain, the worldwide recession has opened up new opportunities for external funding, particularly in light of the renewed focus on the value of a “digital economy” at both European and national levels.

In the UK for example, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), which is a government body that promotes collaborative R&D and technology transfer, has made Digital Britain a core programme. £1m of feasibility projects on next-generation optical access are already underway, with the hope that these efforts can evolve into larger projects funded by the European Commission’s Framework 7 program or the proposed Photonics21 ERANET+ fund. In total £30m has been earmarked for Digital Britain themed research, which includes not just optical infrastructure but a range of related topics from internet security to new methods of content delivery over digital test-beds.

Clearly, co-operation between industry and academia will be an important source of technological progress in optical networking for the foreseeable future. And that’s why an event like ECOC, which brings the two worlds together with its technical conference and exhibition, should take on a new significance for all concerned.

Pauline Rigby is a science and technology writer specialising in optical communications, and former editor of FibreSystems Europe magazine.

The market for 40 Gbit/s optical transport equipment is growing strongly and looks set to enjoy a five-year period of deployment opportunity before the 100 Gbit/s market gets into full swing, according to industry analysts.

The latest figures from research firm Dell’Oro indicate that worldwide revenues for 40 Gbit/s equipment are expected grow at a combined annual growth rate of 35%, reaching a market size of $1.2 billion by 2013.

“While the overall worldwide optical market declined 20% sequentially and 11% year-over-year mainly due to the effects of the global economy, the 40G market has shown continued growth and strength with a 1Q09 increase of 8% sequentially and 400% year-over-year,” said Jimmy Yu, optical market analyst, Dell’Oro.

And about time too. Early 40 Gbit/s implementations first appeared in 1999, some 10 years ago, and the technology has been through four product generations. In contrast, 100 Gbit/s technology is enjoying significant operator and vendor interest even though it is still in its first generation.

Almost every major equipment vendor has carried out a 100 Gbit/s field trial in the last year or so. And US carrier AT&T has stressed the need for higher capacity links on its network, stating that “every 10 Gbit/s lambda deployed today will become a 100 Gbit/s lambda by 2012″.

Naturally, this kind of optimism provokes questions about whether carriers might skip 40 Gbit/s and move straight to 100 Gbit/s. However, the analysts contacted by fibresystems.org think that isn’t likely to happen.

“First deployments [of 100G] will definitely be in 2012, as some equipment will be available by end of this year, and some carriers will deploy it just to be ‘first’,” said Eve Griliches, program director for IDC’s telecoms research. “But my guess is that real volume deployment will be in a third generation development of 100G, which will not be in 2012, but a year or two after that.”

David Dunphy, principle analyst with Telecoms Strategy Partners, believes the window of opportunity for 40 Gbit/s technology could last even longer. “40G has a strong life left, and will continue to grow and enjoy good opportunities for the next five to six years,” he contends.

“The challenges in successfully commercializing 100G as well as overcoming the technical challenges are greatly underestimated,” he added. “Commercially, we think it could take at least another three years after 2011 for 100G to fully ‘prove in’ from the business case perspective.”

Griliches believes the fact that the majority of vendors are coordinating their efforts around a single modulation format will help speed 100 Gbit/s to market. “What 100G has going for it is the ability to leverage all the technological development that has gone into 40G to date, which leave less of a new burden on that technology,” she said.

But she agrees that the industry is still very much in the early stages of understanding 100G technology, and whether it will meet the distance requirements set for 10G and 40G — the implication being that ongoing R&D might turn up a better solution than the one currently being commercialized.

“If new modulation formats come to market that make 100G even more compelling, that will push the roadmap out again, leaving the window for 40G open even longer,” she said.

Reproduced with permission. © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Ltd.

WDM NICE, 2009 — Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) and Juniper Networks seem to be forging an ever closer relationship. Having recently joined forces to sell Carrier Ethernet equipment, the pair are now working together to integrate IP routing with WDM equipment — a concept called IP-over-DWDM or just IPoDWDM.

This development aligns Juniper’s strategy more closely with that of Cisco Systems, which originally introduced IPoDWDM about three and a half years ago.

Juniper is bringing IP router expertise to the party, while NSN is providing its optical transport solution, and operational systems for both technologies. The aim is “to enable seamless interworking between IP and optical networks to improve network efficiency and reduce operator opex”.

Simply put, a long-distance DWDM laser on a router card injects a signal into the WDM system, which travels to the router at the other end of the link. “Often people refer to this as an alien wavelength; what we’re trying to do is make this into a friendly wavelength,” explained Stefan Voll, head of solution sales management at NSN.

The partners have already demonstrated how this might work. The Norwegian research network operator Uninett has successfully tested a coloured OTU-2 interface on a Juniper T-series core router connected to NSN’s hiT7300 WDM platform, and managed by the latter’s Transport Network Management System (TNMS).

This approach generates some capex savings, because the short-reach, “grey” optics that would normally connect the core router to the WDM system are eliminated. “In the grand scheme of things that [capex saving] might be a relatively small amount, but at 40G and 100G the savings could be more significant,” Voll pointed out.

However, the prime motivation for IPoDWDM is to streamline the network in order to save operational costs. In an IPoWDM system, there would be fewer components to fail, monitor and manage, and there would be some rack-space and power savings, according to Voll.

Even greater opex savings should be possible as a result of integrating the IP and optical transport layers.

In the short term, the idea is to give the router more visibility into the optical layer to provide more options for protection and restoration. “There are two trends in the IP/MPLS world, and they are both contradictory,” explained Voll. “The first is the increasing focus on service-level agreements — more mission critical applications are being carried on IP/MPLS. The second is the move towards plain Ethernet instead of SONET/SDH interfaces, and the resultant loss of valuable troubleshooting information. If the carrier has access to the Layer 1 view, which they would have with IPoDWDM, then they can take remedial action to prevent packet loss.”

In the medium term, NSN/Juniper are targeting a single management and service provisioning platform for Layers 1, 2 and 3. Today, implementing new IP services requiring additional optical connectivity is a cumbersome process, because IP and optical transport are often managed by different departments using different management systems, and may even have different network operations centres. Unifying those departments will ease this problem — if carriers are willing to take the plunge.

Cisco welcomed the NSN/Juniper combo to the IPoDWDM party. “I was very excited by the announcement,” said Russ Esmacher, senior product line manager for Cisco’s optical transport business unit, in response to a question from the audience on Cisco’s reaction. “It’s not just Cisco anymore. Now the whole industry is starting to discuss IPoWDM to see if it’s a good fit with their networks.”

Esmacher suggested that this development could also lead to interoperability between the two core router vendors. That’s because for IPoDWDM to work in the first place, the properties of the optics on the router port must be very well characterized, and be integrated into the DWDM system’s planning and design tools, so that it can be managed in exactly the same way as a standard transponder. Now that’s what I call friendly!

Reproduced with permission. © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Ltd.

WDM NICE 2009 — GMPLS and network automation were one of the key trends being discussed at IIR’s WDM & Next- Generation Optical Networking conference in Nice last week.

GMPLS emerged as a new control plane technology for optical networks almost 10 years ago, but it’s still a roadmap item for most ROADM vendors, according to Geoff Bennett, Infinera’s director of strategic marketing.

The ability to add new capacity quickly is often praised by Infinera’s customers, and to back up its point the vendor parked its GMPLS demo right outside the conference venue.

Service activation is one of the functions that GMPLS can enable, others being network design automation, routing optimization, protection and restoration, and real-time inventory reports showing exactly where equipment and bandwidth are available in the network.

Infinera argues that “you need a digital optical network to fully unlock the economic benefits of an intelligent optical control plane”. In other words, OEO conversions are required at each node, because this zeros the accumulated optical impairments. This removes the need to know about the physics of each optical link, which simplifies the routing algorithms and makes everything possible.

But other vendors disagree. Alcatel-Lucent, for one, appears to be working towards a similar goal of network automation with its “Zero Touch Photonics” concept. In his presentation on Tuesday, WDM product line manager Sam Bucci described several novel features for a ROADM-based network that would enable it to be operated with confidence from a remote operations centre.

A wavelength tracker integrated into the ROADM provides insight into the physical properties of the light. Digital signal processing (DSP) at the receiver eliminates the need for manual adjustments to dispersion compensating modules. The third feature — not yet available — is what the vendor calls “fast adaptable transponders”, which can adjust their optical output to suit the transmission line parameters. And then, of course, the network management software needs to tie it all together.

Not surprisingly given its dominance in the ROADM market, Cisco is also looking to automate ROADM networks using GMPLS — and calls its vision “Zero Touch Flexible Optical Networks”.

“We all agree that the control plane is the best way to drive savings in the network,” said Russ Esmacher, senior product line manager for Cisco’s optical transport business unit, in his presentation on Thursday, but noted that “at the moment GMPLS is photonically ignorant”.

However, it sounds like Cisco is working on this problem. Eschmacher suggested that the network could contain “strategically placed OEO conversions” with each ROADM having one or two OEO transponders available if required.

The GMPLS control plane would also need to be aware that the signal needs cleaning up. “A computation that is needed to determine if OEO is needed is something that a WDM network can do quite easily,” Esmacher claimed.

The other key pieces of Cisco’s solution are full-band tunable optics, which will be available from JDSU this year, and colourless and omni-directional ROADMs, where each port is not tied to a specific wavelength or direction. (Omni-directional is Cisco’s name for a “directionless” ROADM — after all, who wants a “directionless” product?)

Ultimately, this would tie in with Cisco’s vision of IP-over-WDM, which would see WDM optics added to core routers, and the router’s network management system making decisions about which photonic path to take over the WDM network.

However, “zero-touch” appears to be some way in the future. In Alcatel-Lucent’s case, the ROADMs are available now, but for full effect customers will have to wait for the new transponders, which will be introduced at various data rates over the next few years. Cisco did not give a time-scale for its vision.

And new technology always attracts a premium price; lower prices only come with product maturity and wider adoption. As one attendee put it: “When do you expect to have this at a cost level that most of us can afford?”

Reproduced with permission. © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Ltd.

Although network operators are keen to deploy 40 Gbit/s wavelengths to upgrade their capacity on terrestrial routes, submarine cable systems have stayed at 10 Gbit/s because of the distances involved. But tomorrow in a post-deadline paper to be presented at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC), researchers will describe an experiment that demonstrates the feasibility of transmitting 40 Gbit/s traffic over transoceanic distances.

The experiment involved sending 81 channels at 40 Gbit/s over a distance of 11,520 km — setting a new distance-capacity record.

Key to the breakthrough was a new design of optical fibre, from Amsterdam-based fibre and cable maker Draka. Called LongLine, the fibre has a large effective area, which helps to reduce the effect of non-linearities. In turn, this enables higher launch powers to be used, so the signal can go further before it disappears in the noise.

Large effective area fibre is not a new concept. In fact, Corning unveiled the first large effective area fibre, trademarked LEAF, almost exactly 10 years ago. But to put things in perspective, LEAF has an effective area of about 72 ?m2, while LongLine has an effective area of 120 ?m2 — almost twice the effective area of standard non-zero dispersion shifted fibre (NZ-DSF).

Typically as the mode size is increased in a fibre, the optical field spreads further into the cladding, which leads to higher attenuation and bending loss. To overcome this, Draka applied the technology from its bend-insensitive fibres, using a “trench” in the index profile of the fibre to keep the light contained.

“You can control the bend performance, or you can control the size of the effective area without losing light,” explains Alain Bertaina, marketing director, optical fibre, for Draka.

The other challenge in designing the fibre was keeping the fibre characteristics compatible with negative dispersion fibre. Submarine systems typically use alternating lengths of positive and negative dispersion fibre throughout their length to compensate for chormatic dispersion.

The manufacturing process also has a important role to play, says Bertaina. Draka uses chemical vapour deposition, which allows flexible and very precise definition of the refractive index profile of the fibre. “When we target an [index] profile, even a very complex one, we are able to precisely match the profile we target,” he claims.

• UPDATE 25/09/2008 The transmission experiment was carried out by researchers at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France, and IRISA/INRIA at the Campus Universitaire de Beaulieu, France.

The channels were spaced on a 50 GHz grid, and used polarisation division multiplexed (PDM) binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation scheme with coherent detection. More details are provided in the ECOC post-deadline paper Th 3.E.2, which was presented on Thursday 25 September.

Reproduced with permission. © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Ltd.

The standardization of higher data rates is vital if Ethernet is to continue as a ubiquitous end-to-end protocol. Pauline Rigby finds out how standards are progressing.

Ethernet has traditionally evolved in multiples of 10, from the first successful commercial version of Ethernet at 10 Mbit/s through Fast Ethernet (100 Mbit/s), Gigabit Ethernet (1 Gbit/s) to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 Gbit/s) – the highest speed available today. But the next multiple — 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) — hit a speed bump when disagreement arose between different interests within the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG).

Eventually vendors reached an agreement, deciding to add 40 Gbit/s data rate to the proposed standard for 100 GbE, which allowed things to move on to the next stage. On 5 December 2007, the HSSG officially became the IEEE P802.3ba Task Force, doing the technical work to define the standard. Here Pauline Rigby talks to John D’Ambrosia, chair of the Task Force, whose full-time job is to guide the process and ensure the work finishes on time.

PR: What’s driving the demand for higher data rates?
JD’A: Quite simply traffic was growing at such a rate in network aggregation applications, especially with the proliferation of 10 GbE, that it needed a higher-speed solution. People were talking about aggregating 16 or 32 links of 10 GbE to handle all of the servers they were using. Link aggregation was becoming very unwieldy; we needed something faster.

Naturally the Ethernet switch vendors were the most vocal about the need for 100 GbE, but it wasn’t just them. One of the big differences between this project and its predecessors was the involvement with the end-user community. We had people from Google, EDS, Microsoft Networks and AMS-IX [Amsterdam Internet Exchange]. We had content providers coming in because video drives the bandwidth through the roof.

One of the examples that really blew people away was from Yahoo! Asia Pacific. They were offering a service for streaming classic major-league baseball games, and filled a 40 Gbit/s pipe. They don’t know what the capacity request actually was because they had to cap the service at 40 Gbit/s.

I was talking with an individual who was at Google at the time of the HSSG, and he said that: “People point at Google as the anomaly and say well that’s just Google. I can tell you that where Google was a year and a half ago is where all of the other data centres are coming to now, they’re all starting to hit these problems.”

If the demand for bandwidth is growing so rapidly, how did the need for an intermediate rate at 40 Gbit/s arise?
There’s one chart that really helps to explain this question (figure 1). This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. This chart was based on input from a server vendor. He was talking about Moore’s Law and how the server I/O [input/output] doubles every 24 months. When the growth curve for network aggregation was added, what we see is two different growth rates for two different applications. Core networking doubles every 18 months, server I/O doubles every 24 months. When you plot this out over time you can see this leads to a huge difference.

We mapped different Ethernet standards across the lines, and looked at how that relates to the needs. You can see why Gigabit Ethernet was pretty much an instant success when it was released in 1998. It instantly hit the requirements for network aggregation, and a couple of years later it hit the servers.

Computing and networking bandwidth needs for 40 and 100?GbE.

In general people say Gigabit Ethernet was a huge success, but when you ask about 10 GbE, it’s a different story. If you were talking to someone who was judging 10 GbE by the value it brought to networking, those individuals say it was a raging success, and you can see that from the chart. However, if you were talking to people who were judging by ports shipped, i.e. server vendors, they say they don’t really need it and won’t need it until around 2010.

To move forward within the IEEE you need to have 75% consensus. Considering the two different backgrounds of the people present in the room, you can imagine the difficulty the group at that time had in coming to grips with this problem so that it could move ahead.

You must have been very happy that a consensus was reached. Is it unusual to have two different rates being developed for a single standard?
Yes it is unusual; it’s the first time history that we’d had two new rates at one time, so saying it’s a big deal is an understatement. But while it was unusual to do the two rates, when you look at the chart it becomes apparent that two rates was the right decision.
Some people are saying that 100 GbE is going to be late. Is that the case?

There are many people that will tell you that 100 GbE is going to be late, and if you look at the chart you can understand why they think that. When you look at 100 GbE in relation to the networking applications, it just barely meets the curve. We’re going to finish the specification at around the time the need is there, so there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the group to produce this thing as fast as we can. On the other hand, if you look at the relation to the computing applications, 100 GbE will be seven to eight years early.

Is there a risk that by trying to please everyone you end up pleasing no-one?
Let me answer that from the standards approach. There was essentially a one meeting delay before we were able to become a task force, which impacted on the schedule. However, as the chair my primary job is to make sure that a standard gets done in the proper time frame, and as a result we’ve scheduled accordingly. It really hasn’t been an issue since we made a decision to do it this way.

In fact, we’ve come up with a unique architecture that will satisfy both rates at the same time, and we’ve adopted most of the baseline proposals around that architecture. There are a few more pieces that we need to fill in, but we are making incredible progress.

That’s interesting. Tell us how the architecture can support both rates.
Several of our key objectives concern the physical layer specifications, or PMD [physical medium dependent]. Right now the solutions that are being considered are based on ganging four lanes or 10 lanes: four lanes of 10 Gbit/s, 10 lanes of 10 Gbit/s or four lanes of 25 Gbit/s. Those lanes could be physical lanes or they could be wavelengths. There are also some individuals from a transport background who proposed 40 Gbit/s serial, and others who suggested two lanes.

The next layer in the structure is the PMA, which means physical medium attachment, and that’s where the multiplexing happens. We came up with a unique approach that allows us to adjust the multiplexing to support 10 lanes, four lanes, two lanes — whatever we need.

One of the main areas we had a lot of debate on was in the physical coding. We have just adopted an approach called MLD — multilane distribution — which is based on the standard 64B/66B encoding that we do now in Ethernet. Simply put, it’s a mechanism to distribute the data across those different lanes. So now we have a lane-distribution mechanism that carves up the signal into the right number of lanes for whatever PMD we’re going to target.

The task force met in May. How did that move things along?
The May meeting was phenomenal, and I attribute that to the hard work that the task force is doing in terms of the consensus building and due diligence with the technical issues. We actually wound up making quite a few baseline proposal decisions at that point, which is ahead of schedule.

On the multimode fibre objective for 40 GbE and 100 GbE we’ve adopted a proposal that’s n × 10.3125 Gbit/s across parallel fibres. For the 40 km 100 GbE and the 10 km by 100 GbE we’ve adopted a 4 × 25 Gbit/s architecture. The decision on 40 GbE over 10 km hasn’t been made yet.

There are two proposals out at this point — one is for 40 Gbit/s serial and the second is for a 4 × 10 Gbit/s CWDM [coarse wavelength division multiplexed] approach. That will be one of the key decisions we’ll need to make at the July meeting so that we can move ahead.

What’s the timetable for completing the 40/100 GbE standard?
To keep to our schedule we aim to generate draft 1.0 after the September 2008 meeting. The next phase will be a Working Group Ballot — that’s where you open it up to the 802.3 Ethernet Working Group for comment, which is scheduled for the March meeting in 2009. After that comes the Sponsor Ballot in November 2009, where you open it up to the members of the IEEE Standards Association. The standards release is scheduled for June 2010.

For more information visit www.ieee802.org/3/ba/.

Reproduced with permission. © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Ltd.

Bob Metcalfe, often called the “father of Ethernet”, will be delivering a keynote speech at the OFC/NFOEC show tomorrow about the inevitability of Terabit Ethernet, which he says will get started by 2015.

And before that today, George Gilder will be giving a the closing keynote presentation at the 2008 Executive Forum, which is organized by the Optical Society of America (OSA) in conjunction with media house Pennwell. Although the title has not been revealed, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s going to have something to do with the “exaflood” — the collective wave of data that’s going to overwhelm the existing Internet infrastructure in the near future unless there’s significant investment in new equipment.

Isn’t it exciting to see such big numbers being bandied about? An “exabyte” is one thousand petabytes, which in turn is one thousand terabytes, or put another way, it’s 1018 bytes of data. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly 50 thousand times the amount of information in the US Library of Congress if it were held in digital form.

It turns out that Gilder and Metcalfe have a history of predicting runaway data traffic growth and the ensuing Internet doomsday. Writing in an InfoWorld column in 1995, Metcalfe calculated that the Internet backbones carried a mere 15 terabytes of traffic per month, while an estimated 15 exabytes of data might be circulating in the world’s local area networks. If those exabytes of data found their way onto the Internet, there would be a “catastrophic collapse” the following year, he predicted.

(Just for fun, it’s worth recalling that in 1997 Metcalfe admitted he’d been wrong. At an April conference, he literally ate his words, putting a copy of his article in a blender and drinking the resulting pulp.)

Metcalfe’s use of the term exabyte led Gilder to coin the term “exaflood” in 2001. And now its Gilder’s turn to sound the alarm bells. In an article co-written with Brett Swanson of the Discovery Institute published last month, he said that the Internet is about to drown in an exaflood of data created by new applications and services like movie downloading, IPTV, ubiquitous mobile cameras, online gaming, virtual worlds, and telepresence.

Both of these men, who seem to be the most vocal fortune tellers of massive Internet growth, are fronting the industry’s premier annual optical networking event. Now, I don’t know about you, but hearing these prophecies of spiralling data growth gives me a definite sense of déjà vu. Just seeing Gilder’s name on the programme takes me straight back to the hype of 1998 (when, incidentally, I’d just landed my first real job as a reporter with FibreSystems Europe).

Gilder is a self-confessed believer in the “build it and they will come” theory of telecoms. Similarly, on an interview with Light Reading TV, when asked about why we might need Terabit Ethernet, Metcalfe simply said “We build it, they will come, I’m sure. It’s happened every time for 35 years.”

Excuse me, but wasn’t it exactly this attitude that got the industry into trouble in the late 1990s?

The network operators built it and the Internet users did come… eventually. But for many companies and their investors the wait was too long, and they faced bankruptcy before their ideas could make any money. Much of the intellectual property survived somehow, but a lot of shareholders, which in many cases turned out to be pension funds, lost a lot of money. What’s to stop this scenario from playing out again?

Some may argue that this time it is different because the demand is more immediate. Internet service providers say they are suffering because they can’t build out their networks as quickly as they need to. On the other hand, “this time it’s different” could turn out be the most expensive words in the English language.

Obviously the Internet is going to grow, but getting the predictions spot on is a bit like predicting the weather — you know it will stop raining in San Diego at some point, but will it be on Monday like the weatherman says? Oh hang on, its stopped already (smile).

So, is this time any different? Is the telecoms industry going to repeat the mistakes of the bubble years or has it learned its lesson? Let us know your views by using the commenting tool at the bottom of this article.

Reproduced with permission. © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Ltd.