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.

By Patricia Daukantas

Imagine standing in New York and being able to peep through a telescope at people walking down the street in London. Or the other way around.

Nonsense, you say. The magnification required for such a ground-based telescope would be daunting. And then there’s the little matter of the curvature of the Earth over the 5,580-km distance.

However, a British artist has been able to build such a “telescope”—and even to make his creation look like a giant tube that was drilled through the Earth from one coast of the Atlantic Ocean to the other.

On May 20, the public-art project emerged from the banks of the East River in Brooklyn as a giant metal drill bit. By Thursday, the art installation looked like the end of a giant brass and wood telescope poking out of the ground. This “Telectroscope” is Paul St George’s conception of a 19^th-century idea that started when a reporter misspelled the word “electroscope” (a classic device for measuring static electricity) and writers such as Mark Twain spun tales of pictures that could be sent around by telegraph wires.

Although the “story” on St George’s Web site, telectroscope.net, implies that a giant straight-line hole was drilled through the Earth, the gizmo really relies on high-definition cameras linked by undersea fiber-optic cables, courtesy of the European Internet provider Tiscali.

Still, the Telectroscope gives passersby the illusion that they are looking through a giant Victorian spyglass—and they can actually wave at their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.

CNN and the New York Times are among the media outlets sorting out the colorful facts and fiction about this artwork, which will be in operation in both London and New York until June 15. The Telectroscope fits in well with other “steampunk” movies, novels and fashions that have gained popularity in recent years.

By Patricia Daukantas
 
Greetings from San Diego! For the first time since 1999, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference is taking place in this sunny Southern California city. It's my first-ever visit to San Diego, so I'm doubly excited to be here.
 
If I had to summarize this year's OFC theme in as few words as possible, it would be "big pipes." Everyone is talking about the latest high-bandwidth communications technologies that the worldwide growth of the Internet is demanding. People are also realizing that it's important to consider not just the size of the datastream—Gigabit Ethernet, 100-Gigabit Ethernet, Terabit Ethernet, whatever—but also the proper management of it.
 
For example, yesterday afternoon's Future Internet Symposium sought to give the fiber-optics folks who attend OFC/NFOEC the perspective of experts in computer network architecture and computer security. Guru Parulkar of Stanford University's Clean Slate Program said that the present-day Internet is not designed to take full advantage of the dynamic optical network technology that researchers who attend OFC are developing. Adel Saleh of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the organization that gave us the predecessor to the global Internet, said that DARPA is starting a 42-month study of ways to eliminate those bottlenecks. Computer-security expert Stefan Savage of the University of California at San Diego painted a bleak picture of the growth of money-making threats to network users and applications.
 
Headlining today's Service Provider Summit was Reed Hundt, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission in the mid-1990s. Despite the grim title of his talk—"The Coming Global Triumph of Communications and the Threat to American Standards of Living"—Hundt was surprisingly upbeat. The keys to America's success in growing IT and communications companies, he said, have been our stable legal environment, open networking technology and culture of entrepreneurial leadership. He would like to see the dynamism of the communications industry weave itself into the U.S. energy and health care sectors, which are low in venture capital and IT respectively. (Fascinating fact: Data centers consume 2 percent of all the electricity generated in the United States.)
 
OFC/NFOEC 2008 will wrap up on Thursday evening with the postdeadline paper sessions, which traditionally feature a number of results of "hero experiments" in fiber-optic technology. This year, 35 of 114 submissions were accepted, and I'm looking forward to attending the sessions.