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 C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

Andrew Bach, keynote speaker for the Service Provider Summit at OFC/NFOEC Wednesday morning, presented the daunting challenge the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is facing--having to transmit millions of trades in microsecond timeframes.

Bach painted the picture of an ever-growing network demanding the newest communications technologies for the Exchange to simply keep up with the ballooning number of trades at real-time speeds. “A delay of five or six microseconds could cost several hundred thousand dollars,” he noted.

Bach made it clear that the NYSE is living in a terabit world. “Get me one terabit pipes, please,” said Bach. The Exchange currently uses 2.5 Tbps and the demand for more is going up quickly, said Bach.

What are the volume levels like? There are between 100,000 and 400,000 messages delivered every second on the NYSE itself. By the end of the decade, Bach said the exchange expects to grow to 10 million messages every second.

Whatever delay there does seem to be is related to the need for the exchange to store the information in its New Jersey data center, according to Bach. This is critical for investigations that might come in the future.

The NYSE is “now a heavy consumer of dark fiber; we are lighting it ourselves,” says Bach. An important advance has been the Exchange's ability to operate the data center remotely, a condition that was necessary recently as the result of blizzards in the area did not allow people to be physically present at the center as markets stayed open.

The Exchange currently uses 6,000 routers and switches, 200,000 1Gbps ports or below, and 10,000 10 Gbps ports, according to Bach.

What are the challenges? “As the bandwidth keeps going up and up, the jitter has to be brought down to near zero if not zero,” according to Bach. “We have far too many switches waiting in case something breaks. If I cant start putting in one terabit links, it's just not worth it.”

Likewise, latency needs to keep becoming less of a factor. It is one reason why the data are not encrypted for security purposes. However, as Bach points out, the data are no longer of use after a second or two anyway as they become stale after the newest trade.

Something else on Bach's wish list? Hollow core fibers, which he believes will also speed trades.

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.

OFC/NFOEC OFC/NFOEC, Service Provider Summit, fiber optics, optical communications, David Chaffee, The Optical Society, OSA

By C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

“We are on the way to the gigabit society,” said OFC/NFOEC 2011 keynote speaker Bruno Orth Tuesday morning at the plenary session. Orth defines the gigabit society as a mobile broadband photonic network that is all IP. “The price for WDM has gone down tremendously over the past decade,” said Orth. Router performance is much better than Moore's law would estimate.

New networking models are needed to deal with the economics of fiber to the home, Orth said. “The first 20 percent of those receiving it are not the problem,” he observed. “The last 20 percent account for up to 50 percent of the networking cost. Therefore, we need a new model for FTTH infrastructure”

A helpful exercise for service providers that is used at Deutsche Telekom is to assume that all your customers use smart phones, or that all your customers had their full content in the cloud, or that they all used VOIP and roamed freely, according to Orth. He raised the growing fear that many have that smart phones have the potential to stress or even crash the network.

“We are engaged in optics in a way we have never been before,” said Alan Gara, IBM Fellow and Blue Gene Chief Architect. “All interconnects in the new IBM supercomputers will be optical by 2018,” according to Gara. “Without optics we will not be able to continue to build systems,” he continued. “The optical boundary will continue to move in.” The only way IBM will be able to achieve its next gen supercomputing goals will be through optics, he said.

Kristin Rinne of AT&Labs said there has been an 8,000 percent increase in mobile broadband traffic over the last four years, noting that the application behind much of the growth is video. “There is an awfully lot of wireline in the wireless network,” said Rinne, who quoted Dell'Oro report numbers which say that $8 billion will be spent on fiber and microwave mobile backhaul upgrades in the next five years.

Congratulations to the following winners acknowledged at the plenary session: Constance Chang-Hasnain (David Sarnoff award),  David Welch (Tyndall Award), the following OSA fellows: Young-Kai Chen (Bell Labs), Charles Cox (Photonic Systems), Michael Eiselt (ADVA Optical), Nicholas Frigo (U.S. Naval Academy), Jonathan Knight ( University of Bath), Ashok Krishmamoorthy (Oracle Labs), Xiang Liu (Bell Labs), William Shieh (University of Melbourne), and Lakshmin Tamil (University of Texas).  IEEE Communications Society fellows include: Debabani Choudhury (Intel), Paul Morton (Morton Photonics), Jawadand Salehi (Sharif University of Technology) and Jane Simmons (Monarch Network Architects). IEEE Photonic Society fellows include Douglas Baney (Agilent Technologies), Jin-Xing Cai (Tyco), Nareseh Chand (BAE Systems), Frederick Kish (Infinera), Paul Morton (Morton Photonics, again), Rodney Waterhouse (Pharad), and Alice White (Alcatel-Lucent).

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.

OFC/NFOEC, OSA David Chaffee, OFC/NFOEC, fiber optics, optical communications, Moore's law, IBM, OSA, The Optical Society, Optics & Photonics News

By Patricia Daukantas

A Cornell University (U.S.A.) scientist specializing in on-chip nanophotonics devices has won a $500,000 “genius grant” fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

OSA Fellow Michal Lipson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, is one of 23 award recipients in diverse fields ranging from astrophysics to sculpture, theater and jazz. MacArthur Fellows receive $500,000 over five years with no strings attached.

The 40-year-old Lipson received the award for “working at the intersection of fundamental photonics and nanofabrication engineering to design silicon-based photonic circuits that are paving the way for practical optical computing devices,” according to the foundation’s website. She was named an OSA Fellow in 2008 for “outstanding contributions to the field of silicon nanophotonics, including the development of high-bandwidth modulators and low-power nonlinear optical devices.”

The MacArthur Foundation has put a brief biography and video of Lipson online. I wrote about her work in the November 2006 Scatterings column (four-wave mixing within a broadband light amplifier) and also in January 2008 (a microfluidic device that used light to sort tiny particles).

2010-09 September, Applied optics, Biomedical optics, OFC/NFOEC nanotechnology, awards, OSA Fellows, women, photonics, silicon photonics

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