By Patricia Daukantas

Every scientific advancement has a story behind it. Telecommunications fibers and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are no different. Donald Keck and James Fujimoto--the first two CLEO:2011 plenary speakers--did a great job of telling those true tales.

Donald Keck, a retired Corning Inc. (U.S.A.) scientist who participated in the development of the first low-loss optical fiber, attributed the telecom boom to a “syzygy” of rapid-fire technological developments four decades ago. In addition to that first practical fiber, the earliest computer-network experiments, the room-temperature laser chip and the computer chip all appeared between 1969 and 1971.

Evoking the original notion of the laser as a “solution looking for a problem,” Keck drew chuckles by reminding the audience of schemes for laser cutting of trees, laser-made nipples for baby bottles and Arthur Schawlow’s “laser eraser” for typists. Early proposals for laser telecommunications--by sending light beams down 2-in.-wide coaxial cables--were not much more practical.

Fortunately, British government researchers asked Corning for help in creating glass fibers with attenuation below 20 dB/km, at a time (1966) when the best silica fiber suffered from signal loss of 1,000 dB/km. Drawing upon glass research from the 1930s to the 1950s, Keck and his Corning colleagues started tracking down and eliminating the sources of optical loss in fiber.

Their initial fiber-drawing equipment was crude--including a household vacuum cleaner--but effective. When Keck tested the first fiber with a loss of only 17 dB/km, he was so impressed that he wrote in his lab notebook, “Whoopee!” However, in 1970 an Applied Physics Letters reviewer initially rejected the Corning team’s paper because, Keck said, “it lacked believability.”

Today’s single-mode fibers fulfill Keck’s 1972 prediction of operation with losses of 0.2 dB/km or less at the 1,550-nm wavelength. Progress in telecommunications has come rapidly, especially after the 1984 court-ordered breakup of the old Bell-System AT&T, which created “a lot of fiber-hungry ‘baby Bells,’” Keck said. With the development of fiber that can bend around sharper corners without introducing losses, the industry is poised to use fiber in ways traditionally associated with copper wire.

OCT: Joining Optics and Clinical Science

OCT is a method of imaging using echoes of light--the optical analogue of ultrasound, said James Fujimoto of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.A.). In terms of resolution and tissue penetration, OCT bridges the gap between ultrasound and confocal microscopy.

Although Michel A. Duguay and A.T. Mattick first suggested the technique in a 1971 Applied Optics article, the first demonstration of OCT, performed on a cadaver eye, was published two decades later, according to Fujimoto. Since then, progress has come rapidly, with the technique’s extension to living tissue and the commercial development of OCT equipment for clinical use. Today, spectral domain interferometric techniques have improved both the speed and sensitivity of OCT. High-speed CCD cameras and volumetric data-rendering techniques have added to OCT’s ability to track dynamic processes such as capillary blood flow.

OCT is now moving beyond ophthalmic procedures into the world of intravascular imaging, where the technique can identify unstable arterial plaques and guide the medical treatment of those dangerous blood-flow blockers.

Fujimoto said that there has been a huge increase in intravascular OCT procedures in the last three years. The development of tiny fiber-optic catheters and the Fourier-domain mode-locked (FDML) laser have helped make this possible.

Finally, Fujimoto drew the audience’s attention to one of this CLEO’s postdeadline papers, which reports a record imaging speed for OCT using a swept single-mode vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). OCT promises to be an exciting technological field to watch in the near future.

Applied optics, Biomedical optics, CLEO/QELS, Fiber optics, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO CLEO, CLEO2011, lasers, laser, fiber optics, biomedical optics, Donald Keck, James Fujimoto, optics, photonics, Optics & Photonics News, Patricia Daukantas, OPN

By C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

Two Japanese groups demonstrated Thursday night at the OFC/NFOEC 2011 postdeadline paper sessions that they can send more than 100 terabits per second (Tbps) through one hair-thin optical fiber.

Qian et al. from NEC Laboratories America reached 101.7 Tbps over standard single-mode fiber using pilot-based phase noise mitigation. The team sent 370 wavelengths each with data rates of 294 Gbps over 165 km of standard single-mode fiber to achieve the results. The team said it achieved spectral efficiency of 11 bits/s/Hz, which it considered the highest reported spectral efficiency to date for wavelength-division multiplexing transmission.

A separate team, Sakaguchi et al. from Sumitomo Electric Industries in Japan, demonstrated 109 Tbps using spatial division multiplexed signals over a seven-core fiber. The Sumitomo group sent 97 colors through each of the cores at data rates of 172 Gbps (two 86 Gbps QPSK signals). The team sent the data over 16.8 km of fiber.

The 34 postdeadline papers came from a variety of sources, including Oracle Labs, IBM, NEC Labs America, Hewlett-Packard, ZTE, the University of Southampton, the Technical University of Denmark, the Heinrich Hertz Institute, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, TE Subcom, Sumitomo Electric Industries, the University of Melbourne, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of California-San Diego, the Technical University of Berlin, Infinera, Alcatel-Lucent, the Technical University of Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, Nokia-Siemens Networks and NTT Photonics Labs.  

C. David Chaffee (cdcfiber@aol.com) owns Chaffee Fiber Optics, a Baltimore-based firm that specializes in analyzing developments in fiber optics and publishing on the state of the industry.

Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC OFC/NFOEC, postdeadline papers, fiber optics, optical communications, David Chaffee, The Optical Society, OSA, optics

By Patricia Daukantas

To celebrate Charles Kao’s share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics for his pioneering fiber optics work, the FiO/LS conference brought together industrial and academic researchers for a special symposium on optical communications.

OSA’s 1995 president, Tingye Li, kicked off the conference with a historical overview of the field that, as a longtime researcher at AT&T/Bell Laboratories (U.S.A.), he was well-positioned to witness and influence.

Noting that Kao’s Nobel came exactly 100 years after Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun won it for “wireless telegraphy,” Li said that the award to Kao fulfilled the original intent of the prize to recognize innovations that benefit human society. He listed Kao’s three great innovations:

• Conceptualizing optical fiber communications by proposing glass fibers as a viable data-transmitting medium;
• Having the insight that silica would be the low-loss medium of choice for future communications and rigorously verifying that experimentally, showing his understanding of the fundamental physics behind the application; and
• Traveling around the world to spread his “gospel” of optical communications until the industry began to take it seriously.

Li noted the characteristic engineering language of Kao’s first paper on the subject in 1966. He wrote that silica fibers may have a “large information capacity,” when the correct adjectival phrase might have turned out to be “astronomically large.” After all, the capacity of optical fiber systems has multiplied 1-million-fold since Corning Inc. developed the first truly low-loss fiber in 1970 and the telecom industry started its early field trials shortly thereafter.

Other symposium speakers included Peter Schultz of Corning (U.S.A.), David Payne of the University of Southampton (England) and Hiroshi Takahashi of NTT Photonics Laboratories (Japan). (Shultz recently wrote an article for OPN about the development of the first low-loss optical fibers.)

Current OSA director-at-large Neal Bergano of Tyco Electronics (U.S.A.) capped off the symposium by describing the types of cable armor, repeaters and large ships that go into building the planet’s undersea communications infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of optical cables now stretch across ocean and sea floors, either as direct links or branch-and-trunk networks. They certainly transmit digital data for far less cost than the $5 per word for telegrams sent via the first permanent transatlantic telegraphic cable in the late 1860s.

More FiO/LS Coverage

Today (Thursday) is the final day of the conference, with a number of invited talks on intriguing topics.

I haven’t forgotten the OSA Student Chapter members whose competition I photographed -- watch for coverage in an upcoming blog post. Also, I wrote about OSA Fellow Michal Lipson’s talk at the MWOSA gathering in OPN’s Bright Futures Blog.

Fiber optics, FiO/LS, Frontiers in Optics, Optics history, OSA optics, photonics, Optics & Photonics News, Charles Kao, OSA, The Optical Society, Frontiers in Optics, optical communications, fiber optics, Patricia Daukantas

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The fiber optics community honored its own leader last night with a special two-hour tribute to Charles Kao, considered the founder of fiber optics. This was the first time the entire community has met at its most popular conference following Charlie's elevation to Nobel laureate.

It was in 1966 when Charlie wrote his famous paper with George Hockham suggesting that commerciable levels of photons could transmit voice and data using laser beams over "a glassy" conduit.

Incredibly, the paper's thesis played out. Only four years later, the famous team from Corning made the first optical fibers that met the 20 db/km spec mentioned in the Kao paper as suggesting a potentially commerciable product. This immediately put flesh on the bones of the paper, gave it credibility. There was a path where remaining steps could be played out.

The celebration last night included various aspects of the technology's playing out, including the Corning effort. William Shaver brought the news from the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence in May 1966 that the potential of optical fiber could lead to commercial applications. Corning's Bill Armistead named Robert Maurer to lead a small team. Don Keck and Peter Schultz joined soon thereafter. But glass losses were in the thousands of decibels per kilometer. After much frustration, the team was able to make a fiber that had losses of 17 db/km, which met the standard. Keck wrote in his lab notebook: "Whoopee!"

Corning thereafter decided to put optical fiber into the development phase in 1971. This was followed in 1972 by a further research step forward when gernania doping was added. This led to levels of 4 db/km.

This led to countless depositions and lawsuits as Corning was to successfully defend its patents in the years to come.

Charlie's Nobel speech was repeated by his wife, Gwen, last night. Gwen also gave the speech in Sweden. Charlie, who has Alzheimer's, was at both events but did not further participate.

As Gwen points out, the world knew about the announcement from the Nobel Committee within minutes of its announcement thanks to the fiber optics technology that Charlie had originally founded.

Charlie, who was raised in Shanghai, received special treatment from his parents because two older siblings had died from an epidemic when they were 10 and 12 years of age. He moved to the U.K. for college and stayed thereafter for many years before moving back to China,.He began working at ITT and began research that was to lead to the 1966 paper. His original area of concentration was microwave.

Interestingly, he spent the late 1960s, after publication of the paper, selling the idea of fiber optics around the world--to Japan, Europe and the United States, according to the Nobel speech. "Nothing in our lives was planned. It has been a roller coaster," Gwen observes.

Charlie and Gwen lived in Roanoke, Va. for eight years beginning in 1974. He was named Executive Scientist at ITT and the family moved to Connecticut thereafter.

In the 1980s, Charlie's prophesy that fiber optics would change telecommunications were coming true. Those who recall expensive three minute calls can appreciate how much current calls cost. Gwen suggests that this was the result of fiber optics.

"Charles planted the seed, but it would never have grown without many hands doing the toil," said Gwen. "Charles thanks all those who have worked to do that. And the plant is still growing."

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC, Optics history fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, nobelists, charles kao, nobel prize, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

We sometimes forget that the service providers need to stay up almost in real time with the varous iterations the Internet is going through. Forget getting over voice to accommdate data. The Internet has metamorphosed far beyond that and is changing almost daily.

"The super-aggregators are changing the way the Internet is configured," says Verizon's Stuart Elby, who spoke at the Service Provider Summit this morning. Up until recently the Internet was "well structured," and then the Googles came along and changed all that, he laments. "You and I used to be albe to connect to the Internet the same way businesses did."

These super aggregators now account for about 50 percent of Internet traffic, Elby calculates. "These hyper-giants are aggregating a lot of content." He calculates there are 30 or 40 main culprits.

One could say they are having a worldwide impact if one is following what is happening in China with Google. Indeed, they are changing the face of the Internet globally. Elby calculates that more than a billion people now use the Internet.

This has caused a big change from Verizon's perspective. "It also has changed how goods and services are paid for on the Internet," he observes.

"The result is that content is being higly consolidated by a small number of hyper giants."

Other changes have included flow from the premise through passive optical networking technology, which in some instances have caused the bottleneck to be pushed farther out into the network. And of course there is the advent of cloud computing.

"In the past we saw a simple number of devices, such as computers and MACs," says Stuart. "More recently we have seen thousands of different types of devices with different formats connected to the network. User content sometimes has to be transformed into hundreds or thousands of different flavors."

But those are not the only changes. Some time in the last two years it became clear that the Internet was being accessed more by mobile devices than fixed devices, according to Stuart. "This concerns me greatly," says Stuart. "Mobile IP which is what most wireless networks are based upon, MIP, are all about simplifying the control at the cost of the tradeoff of not optimizing the router." The result is Verizon is looking for companies to "optimize the routing. Please either optimize or take us away from mobile IP."

There is a good reason Stuart is almost pleading in this request. The company's FiOS fiber to the home build is largely closing down at least for now and the carrier is focusing on wireless technologies next year. It is in a battle with AT&T to build the best wireless network in America, a theme that is being played out in competing national ad campaigns.

With the prospect of bringing 1 gig to the home and potentially 10 gig to the home, Verizon is rapidly upgraiding to 40 gig in the metro space, says Stuart. This is going to the head end if a cable company a central office if a telco.

Is it any wonder that Verizon is the first company to go to 100 gig in its commercial network in North America? "We are quickly going from 10 to 40 to 100 gig all because end users at the bottom are trying to get to the clouds on top," he says referring to a viewgraph he shows.

The end result? "Lots of users are trying to get content from a very few sources," says Stuart. And the bandwidth requirements keep on heading up to the clouds.

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, internet, 21st century, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics 

One thing that became very clear when I interviewed Randy Giles, this year's Tyndall award winner, was that he has been involved in a wide array of the seminal breakthroughs that have driven fiber optics in the past 25 years. In the time that Giles career has spanned Northern Telecom and mainly Bell Labs he has been involved with the development of optical amplification, wavelength division mulitiplexing, optical add/drop multiplexers and optical switching--all in a substantive manner.

As part of my interview with him this morning as part of the Fiber Story history series, Randy describes a highly involved career that essentially defined the milestones of optical transport achievement and advancement. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, the modest Giles got his Ph.D in laser physics and initially worked with the legendary Jan Conradi at Bell Northern Research. His initial work was in gigabit optical transmission, which was very exciting at a time when fiber optic systems topped out at 405 Mbps or 560 Mbps.

"I was an neophyte, didn't understand anything about fiber optics," he recalls. "But I did have a background in electronics. Conradi told me to do some homework in fiber optics. Literally a few months later I started working on gigabit fiber optics."

He started working at Bell Labs in 1986, accepting a position from Tingye Li. His almost magical association with optical transport pioneers, which rivaled Forrest Gump-type fortune, was continuing. "I wasn't thinking clearly after offered the job and didn't accept immediately. However I called back 24 hours later and asked Tingye if the job was still available. It was."

Opitcal amplifiers were part of Giles' Ph.D work and his initial research involved semiconductor optical amplifiers. This led to his involvement with optical amplifiers and wavelength division multiplexing, which avoided the crosstalk and other issues of SOAs.Randy is also proud of his efforts in the design modeling of the optical amplifiers themselves.

The competition to develop optical amplifiers in WDM systems was "very intense" in the 1990 timeframe, Randy notes. Yet the competition at least with Southampton University involving David Payne in the U.K. was friendly to an extent. "There was a time when we were looking to the gain characteristics of the optical amplifiers and there seemed to be a discrepancy between their gain feed and our gain feed. We swapped fibers, we exchanged ideas and we found that their fiber composition was different from ours and that explained the shift of the gain and it all sort of resolved itself. So it was a benign competition."

Giles was also involved with some of the first Bragg grating optical add drop multiplexers. "We had the optical amplifiers, the EDFAs. We had to pump them efficiently. "The challenge was to stabilize the 980 pumps. So we had to work with colleagues to provide a narrow feedback into the laser to stabilize itself. So we had gratings and WDM signals so the next thing was to take the gratings and begin to make the next add drop multiplexers. Today of course arrayed waveguides have superceded the gratings but those gratings were very effective in making the first add drop multiplexers."

It was a bit of a departure to start working on MEMS (micro-electrical mechanical systems) from optical add drop multiplexers, Giles relates. He began working with Dave Bishop and others in that area. "I began working with very simple MEMS switches. I realized we could start putting these together. We started making 4x4 and working with Bill Brinkman began working on the lambda router, which went from 256 by 256 to 1296 by 1296."

"I was in the thick of all of these efforts," says Giles, who most recently has been named to head Alcatel-Lucent Korea. It has been a storied career that still has a few twists and turns to go.  

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, tyndall award, randy giles, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics    

In a rare historical moment, Robert Maurer, Peter Schulz and Don Keck, the team that originally made the first commerciable optical fibers in the world while at Corning, have been reunited at the show this week. I was humbled to have a few moments to talk to them about their revolutionary discovery, which has created a multi-billion dollar industry and changed the face of communications.

It was clear that Maurer was the leader, a man who began to look into low-loss optical fibers in 1966 when the famouns Kao/Hockham paper was first published. "Things went pretty slow at first and it was clear I was going to need some help," says Maurer. "When I got these two guys to join me, things picked up."

Maurer and the team had no doubt what their mission was, and that telephone companies were running out of capacity. "Everybody knew there were constraints and that optical communications was a possible solution," Keck recalls.

Schulz, who will fully detail the discovery tomorrow night at a special event honoring Charles Kao, remembers that it was actually a visit by a Corning official to the British Ministry of Defence that made the possibility clear. "We were really told very specifically by that Ministry of Defence team to try to make single-mode fiber with about a five micron core and to have attenuations of less than 20 dBs per kilometer. So our goal was to go from that to actually succeed."

None of the three would say they knew they were going to succeed from the outset. "We wanted to try," recalls Maurer. "I don't think anything can be done until it is."

Maurer led the group, Schulz was working with materials, Keck was working with measurements. The fibers were being drawn in the development group."We were really seeing if but using fused silica and putting additives into fused silica to change the refractive index," recalls Maurer. "We were trying to see if that method could lead to an actual fiber. We had no idea whether it could or not."

"Together we kept going forward as we ran our experiments," recalls Schulz.

"We were looking for other glasses that were high in silica at that time," says Maurer.

"Bob always told us if we only do things like everyone else, all you can hope for is a tie," says Keck. "We were looking for a win." Therefore, the team decided to take a contrarian approach. "The contrarian approach was to put an impurity in the glass to raise the refractive index--not enough impurity to impair anythiing. Then you put the silica around it. Ultimately it came to that sort of break that led to our winning solution. But it wasn't exactly like falling off a log."

Not hardly. In fact the early fibers the team worked on had losses of tens of thousands of dBs, recalls Schulz, "higher than the best conventional optical glasses. We worked away at it, picked away at it, and found what the mechanisms were and slowly but surely eliminated the losses until finally after four years of work we ended up finding what worked."

There were actually two eureka moments. The first involved Keck, who had just heated a fiber late in the afternoon in 1970, took the fiber out of the furnace and had a laser beam hooked up. "The laser beam hit the core of the fiber and I was blinded by the light. It was a big blaze of helium neon light and then we went through the measurements and had met our goal," recalls Keck.

Schulz says Eureka II came two years later when the team was struggling to bring the fiber to commercial mode. In the meantime it kept working to try to find other additives to improve it. "In 1972 we made a germania doped silica core fiber. This was multimode. This germania doped fiber we were pulling it and the light kep blazing through the fiber. First loss measurement was four dB per kilometer. We knew we had something."

The team stayed engaged thereafter and got support from idfferent teams and the effort got bigger until literally thousands of researchers were involved

While germania doping was a key, it took many, many years before the first long-haul fiber was used, Keck recalls. In fact, it was 12 years after that initial discovery."When you revolutionize the world, young scientists don't understand how long it takes."

Other problems were knocked out one by one through the expanded groups of researchers at Corning and elsewhere. LEDs were used before problems could be overcome with lasers, including coupling. Corning joined with Siemens to create a cable company known as Siecor. General Cable became involved.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Maurer's advice to young scientists? "Don't be afraid. Go ahead and try it." Adds Keck: "Have a dream. Find somebody to share it with."

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC, Optics history fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, optical history

Contributed by: C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The celebration began anew this morning for Charles Kao, the father of fiber optics. This is the first time OFC/NFOEC has had the opportunity to honor him since he won the 2009 Nobel prize in physics, an award he shared with two other physicists. To our industry, he is the man, the kingpin, the major domo, the chairman of the board. In short, he is all that and a bag of chips.

Charlie has been honored before. He was so distinguished on the 25th anniversary of the seminal paper he wrote to launch the industry "Dielectric-fibre surface waveguide for optical frequencies" in the United Kingdom in 1966. This was also an OFC, the one in Baltimore in 1991. In fairness, Charlie co-authored the paper with George Hockham. But he was always the driving force, the passionate philosopher king who was given the providential vision the rest of the world lacked.

OFC/NFOEC does many things well. But at the top of the list is conveying a sense history for the fiber optics industry and this strengthens the sense of overall purpose and mission. Much of that is manifested by celebrations and awards such as this. Charlie's award and recognition comes in large part because what flowed out of the paper.

That's because the things in the paper were on-target. Four years after he predicted a silica fiber could transmit commerciable levels of light with acceptable loss (below 20 decibels per kilometer), Corning made it happen through an extraordinary effort. The accompanying lasers and detectors also were fashioned to make it work.

While humble in nature, Charlie has remained committed to fiber optics. This came through in the times I had the opportunity to interview him, also at OFCs. Once in the early 1980s, I asked him if fiber optics would ever be used for undersea transmission. "The oceans will be littered with fiber," he responded. This was six years before TAT-8, the first trans-oceanic fiber network was to be commissioned.

Charlie also predicted that people would use all the broadband that they could get their hands on, and that the costs would come crashing down. This was before we had dial-up service. And more than a few scientists have speculated that it is more than coincidence that Charlie's decision to settle in China some years ago and the rise of Huawei as a major fiber optics powerhouse.

In honoring Charlie this morning, Bell Labs pioneer Tingye Li recall a quote in 2004 that Charlie had made: "If you ask me how long we will see fibers being used, it may be 1,000 years without a replacement."

That's quite a legacy.

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, Information technology, OFC/NFOEC, Optics history fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, nobel laureates, optics history, charles kao, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

Not surprisingly, the main focus of the OFC Executive Summit at least this morning has been 40 gigs and 100 gigs. Finisar Chairman Jerry Rawls, who had some good one liners, congratulated all in attendance as being "survivors, we are all still alive and can look to 40 G and 100 G to move ahead."

As Ovum's Dana Cooperson pointed out, however, 40 G and 100 G are becoming two distinct markets and technologies. They are no longer lumped together just the next gen high-speed solutions. 40 G is becoming a reality now, while 100 G is still in its very early stages, said Dana.In fact 40 G represented a $500 million market in 2009 and is expected to double again this year. That's beginning to sound serious.

"We are starting to see 40 G take off," said Dana. "We are starting to see the prices get to the point where 40 G makes a lot of sense." She commended Nortel for "incredibly" shipping 100 G product in 2009, although it is still very early days for that space. "We are at the very, very early initial stages for 100 G."

 The idea that major network carriers are holding off for 100 G seems to be lost in the rush of companies actually being able to get 40 G. In fact, Jerry says his company has not yet even begun making 100 G chipsets.

As we step up to the next level, a lot of 10 G is continuing to go in, although Dana said 2.5 Gbps is "starting to die off."

Google again seems to be ahead of the curve. "For us," said Google Senior Network Architect Bikash Koley, " the question is not 40G or 100G but how many 100 G streams you can run in a fiber."

Getting back to Rawls' first quote, its is nice for the fiber optics industry to once again have a market to look forward to, similar to when it looked forward to 10 Gbps back in the 1990s. "Prime time for 40 gig and 100 gig is still ahead of us" said Hans-Juergen Schmidtke at Nokia-Siemens Networks. Schmidtke believes network traffic will grow 100 fold in the next five to seven years.  

So once the 40 gig market reaches maturity, how many successful 100 gig companies will follow? The concensus was three or four on Panel 2: Components and Subsystems for 40- and 100 Gbps."  But those lucky enough to make it should do very well as the market will be huge, according to Sierra Monolithics CEO Javed Patel.

By the way, there is still strong sentiment for consolidation in the optical components space as voiced by Jerry Rawls and Mintera CEO Terry Unter even with all that has happened. However, Jerry doesn't see any companies going out of business as the result of the 100 G consolidation, noting for example that companies in Japan never do. He does expect a few guys in America to "lose their jobs."

But all in all the mood is good, upbeat. There is a lot to look forward to in accommodating burgeoning Internet growth especially as the major carriers wake from their recent cap ex slumber and the building blocks seem to be 40 G and 100 G for years to come.

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, Information technology, OFC/NFOEC fiber optics, communications, optical communications, networks, internet, information technology, ofc/nfoec, executive forum

Post contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

How appropriate to have Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist and the "Father of the Internet" (sorry, Al Gore), kick off the 2010 Executive Forum at OFC/NFOEC this morning. Cerf lives in a world of interplanetary Internets ("Unfortunately, we haven't yet figured out how to stop the planets from revolving around the sun"), where he is notified remotely if his wine cellar gets above a certain temperature,and where terabit speeds down a fiber are everyday realities.

 The 1-Gbps-to-the-home experiment that Google has announced has mainly been about "where the community is going to be located to this point," Cerf said. One town has agreed to change its name to "Google" if it gets the job while a second says it will distribute Google beer if it gets the honor, Vint told us.

Not surprisingly, Google's interest in building such a network is in how it will work. Most of the human interest to this point, and the interest from the Federal Communications Commission, has been for the folks who will be the beneficiaries of such a nice chunk of broadband. "Part of this is trying to find out what the implementation issues are," Vint said. "We are also interested in what the economics are going to look like." We would venture to say that Verizon, AT&T and most other carriers will also be keenly interested in those numbers.

"Its clear that the obvious thing to do is fiber-based," says Cerf about the one gig community. However, high speed radio waves may also play a role. "High speed radio working off fiber is a very attractive combination," he believes.

Regarding applications, Cerf said his hope is that "people will invent applications that we haven't thought of. If there is any lesson to be taken away from the Internet, it is that the users will have a better understanding than any vendor could possibly have." Now, there's a novel idea. After years of trying to have businesses anticipate how people will use bandwidth, why not let the people who use it themselves tell us.

As Charlie Kao, who founded fiber optics and who is being honored this week here at OFC/NFOEC has observed, "If you give people the bandwidth, they will find creative ways to use it." As with any idea that seems to naturally make sense, I have to wonder why we didn't do this years ago.

Ever the realist, Cerf said the 1 Gbps to the premise idea is not new, only new to America. You can actually get 1 Gbps in Tokyo for a reasonable cost and in some other places you can own your own dark fiber, he observed.

Along those lines, Cerf recognizes the problems with security over the Internet, and acknowledges that we are a long way to figuring it all out. He encourages users to constantly change their passwords. "Don't use reusable passwords," he says."Find methods to use dynamic passwords." Makes sense, but easier said than done.

Vint is also concerned about something he calls  "Bit Drop." "How much of the software we use in the year 3000, possibly Windows 3000, will be able to go back and read documents in 2000?" he wondered. "How much software in 2015 will be able to read documents we created in 2000? It's a concern."

It is a concern. Yet somehow it suggests the importance of new interactive software that will not just dump older files it needs to read. 

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, Information technology, OFC/NFOEC google, internet, fiber optics, communications, information technology, ofc/nfoec, 21st century, vinton cerf