USA: The mood at the 34th ECOC, notwithstanding the worsening crisis of the US financial markets, was calm and quiet, as captured succinctly by Rod Alferness, chief scientist, Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs, in his plenary address: “Optimism is appropriate, but caution is judicious.”

The explosion of bandwidth, especially video, and how to address it through optics was a unifying theme throughout the conference.

Speaker after speaker pointed to an unprecedented video-based surge in bandwidth. One example is NHK’s ultra-high-definition ‘Super High Vision’ TV signal, which even compressed requires 160-600Mbps for video, plus 7-28Mbps for audio.

As showcased in the technical sessions, advanced multilevel modulation formats and other techniques that are under development will allow the network backbone to handle traffic growth to multiple terabits per span.

Similarly, access sessions focused on better, cheaper ways to provide 100Mbps or more to residential broadband users and prepare for deployment of femtocells, which will put additional demands on upstream access bandwidth.

Meanwhile, multiple sessions detailed another area of intense network research, optical switch/routers, which have significantly lower power requirements than their electronic counterparts.

As an underpinning for their research, several Japanese speakers cited their country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ data on IP routers’ voracious need for electricity, and noted that forecasted energy requirements would be untenable from a financial and carbon-footprint perspective.

Wanted: Fair pay for increasing bandwidth capacity
However, although the technical sessions were bursting with the latest optics research and development, and how optics will help solve our looming capacity and power dilemma, we found ourselves wondering who will be crazy enough to invest in providing infrastructure solutions.

Carriers, equipment vendors, and component vendors have yet to find business models in this era of flat-rate service pricing that inspire investor confidence that they will be able to turn traffic growth into revenue and profitability growth.