In this summary of the recent NGN conference, the director picked up on Gerry Butters' comment I posted earlier:
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It is impossible for me to summarize such a full week in a short note, so I will just highlight one aspect of the conference--optical networking. The week began with a superb tutorial from Dr. Richard Barry of Sycamore on
Optical Networking Technologies. I thought Rick did a fine job of explaining the whole subject, from SONET, to WDM, to advanced optical internetworking.
The keynote presentations on the following two days took up these themes, and clarified how one leading vendor and one leading service provider see the next few years evolving. Gerry Butters, Group President, Optical Networking, Lucent Technologies, gave an exciting and stimulating talk on The Future of Optical Networking. By the time Gerry finished speaking, I think everyone felt that I was far too cautious when I said that optical networking bandwidth per fiber would keep doubling every year. Gerry said the rate of improvement was at least 130% a year. Jim Crowe, CEO of Level 3 Communications, gave the keynote the next day on Bringing Silicon Economics to IP Networking. Many attendees told me that this was the highlight of the whole week. Jim built on my ideas about abundant gate counts on chips and abundant wavelengths on fiber, and Gerry's points about what is coming next in optical networking. He then showed us how to build a network that is not only at the state of the art today, but remains there in the face of relentless advances and changes in technology.
These keynotes, and Tom Evslin's on how IP Telephony is transforming the public network, were so excellent that we have posted the PowerPoint and streaming video files on the Web. Be sure to visit bcr.com to see their slides, and broadcast.com to see and hear the video of their presentations.
We closed the week with two symposium programs on Friday, one on optical networking, and one on new directions in telephony. The optical symposium was a great capstone for attendees who are building products or services in this space. We heard from pioneering users at Williams and Enron, and pioneering vendors, both in established firms and young startups. I got the strong impression that breakthroughs are coming. That is bound to happen when service providers who are startups buy leading-edge products from vendors who are startups, who in turn are using the latest optics and the newest network processor chips, often from startups as well. The time from innovation to exploitation of the innovation is shrinking at a remarkable rate. The pace of change has definitely accelerated, and Wall Street is paying close attention. . . .
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