So when asked the impossible question of what will fiber be about 10 years from now, veteran executives squirmed slightly, then gamely put forth their two cents. After all, it’s not really that risky a question -- nobody’s going to remember if they were wrong, right?
Carl Russo
Carl Russo, VP of optical networking for Cisco
, says 10 years from now the industry will still be heavily dependent on routers – a wise prediction given Cisco’s current market emphasis."You’re going to have routers regardless," Russo says. "There’s this notion that the routers will do everything in the network. Now there’s this notion, equally obtuse, that optical networking will marginalize routers. Optical networking has been – and will remain – transportation. It’s what moves stuff around in the network. But you are not going to pick up a packet and examine it optically. As I’ve stated in front of many audiences, not in my lifetime. It’s not going to happen."
Charlie Reavis
Lucent
optical cables business VP Charlie Reavis has been in the industry for 30 years, and predicts vast improvements in many of today’s products. "I think in the metropolitan applications and the access applications, the last mile into the residence, it’s possible that you’ll see different materials, different products that will give you the bandwidth that you need," Reavis says. "And you’re going to see improvements in things like powering how you get the fiber to your house. Whether that comes in the form of battery technology or fundamental ways of taking advantage of solar energy, whatever it might be that will be able to provide the powering to that residence, because that’s been one of the fundamental issues in the industry – being able to get the fiber to your house and to the desktop."
The Arlington, Va.-based MultiMedia Telecommunications Association is rather non-committed about the future of fiber systems. In its 2000 Market Review and Forecast, the MMTA pointed out that it remains to be seen whether there will be demand for technology like Lucent’s recently announced OC-768 product (the WaveStar 40G Express), or whether multiplexed OC-48 or OC-192 will be adequate for the foreseeable future.
But MMTA points out that development is continuing on the next stage of WDM technology, called Ultra DWDM, that will ultimately be able to multiplex hundreds of light waves.
Fiber vendors should continue to target cable companies as huge sources of revenue, the MMTA says. Cable companies accounted for the installation of 4.2 million fiber kilometers in 1999, approximately 22 percent of total installations. The growth is expected to continue, peaking in 2001 at 4.5 million kilometers, then decreasing somewhat the following two years to 4.2 million kilometers in 2003, approximately equal to the 1999 level.
The cable companies are hoping to develop new applications, such as video-on-demand, as well as to provide high-speed Internet access. To accomplish these goals, the cable companies must make their systems bidirectional and are upgrading much of their coaxial cable infrastructure with fiber.
Rod Alferness
Reavis’ Lucent colleague Rod Alferness, the CTO of the optical networking group, says the easiest way to answer the question of what lies 10 years ahead is to go back 10 years.
"Ten years ago, the amplifier had just started to happen," says Alferness, a 25-year industry vet. "The amplifier begat the cost-effectiveness of WDM and for those of us who worked in the field for a long time, the ability to channelize the fiber in a way that was optical was really always viewed as being critical for making things like optical switching and optical routing important.
"Because if the fiber capacity was channelized by electronic means, then the likelihood would be that switching multiplexing would be done by electronic means. As soon as the fiber became channelized optically, then that opened up the possibility of optical routing, optical add/drop, optical switching. So that was a key point. But 10 years ago did we think we’d have what we have today? Probably not. Some of us maybe did."
Alferness says breakthroughs will be needed to keep up with bandwidth demand.
"Will we still be talking a lot about wavelengths and will we still be increasing the bit rate per channel, yeah, those things will still be happening," Alferness says. "The other thing is the optical functionality will get even greater."
But really the key driver of where fiber optics will go is where society will lead it, Alferness says.
"If you look back at the history of optics, the wonderful thing was the Internet," Alferness says. "Instead of technologists pushing ‘we can do, we can do, we can do,’ it was the applications saying ‘we demand, we demand, we demand.’ The beauty of where we are right now is that both of those things are driving each other. So a critical piece of where we will be 10 years from now is where society takes us 10 years from now."
Bob Shine, VP of marketing at WaveSplitter, says integration and automation will become increasingly prominent.
"One thing I think will happen three years or five years from now is you’ll see a lot of integration components," Shine says. "If you look at companies right now, to scale manufacturing they’ve basically got to do double head-counts. A thin-film filter requires a work station, and a person at that work station to build it. To double capacity, you have to build another work station and hire another person. That can’t scale to meet the demands of what we’ll have in five to 10 years. The planar waveguide platform and other technology platforms that I’m sure will be developed will offer the integration of functions in a much smaller package that will allow scalability, automation, lower cost, active/passive combinations.
Hus Tigli
"The other thing that will continue are different architectures. People talk about mesh architectures, and you’ll see that developing in the next three to five years. Mesh is just getting started."
Then there is Hus Tigli, CEO of OMM, who offers perhaps the most salient and reliable of observations.
"Ten years from now," Tigli says. "We’ll all know what comes after petabits
