Filling the pipes
Evening, Pat.
I've been reading the December issue of Upside magazine, in which there's an article about Level 3 Communications. There's (what I find to be) an incredibly interesting quote in the article, which I think would put anyone's mind at ease if they are currently doubting future demand in the fiber-optic industry.
Here it is:
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Filling the pipes
Crowe is sitting in a conference room next to his office (which, like every other office at headquarters, is 9 by 9 feet). The technology exists, he says, so that this interview could be done as a teleconference with such high resolution that you'd have to touch the screen to tell that the other person was halfway across the country and not in the same room.
The only hitch: It would require about 200,000 times the network capacity that exists today in the United States.
"We are only putting a limited number of fibers in our first conduit, but let's say we fill every conduit with the maximum available fibers, 432 in a cable," he says. "We lit every one of those fibers at today's maximum capacity, which is 10 gigabits a second. That's more capacity, order of magnitude, than there is in the whole U.S. network together all added up -- many, many times more. We could support exactly about six of the kind of interactions I just talked about."
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FULL TEXT @
upside.com |
