Frank - Call me crazy, but I think the drive will be to get fiber everywhere that isn't flying, floating, rolling, or walking. Is there an equivalent to Moore's Law for fiber buildout?
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Taiwan net companies back 3M fiber interconnect
By Mark Carroll
EE Times
(05/05/00, 11:36 a.m. EST)
TAIPEI, Taiwan ? 3M Corp.'s VF-45 optical fiber network connector standard got a boost Wednesday (May 3) when Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and 14 Taiwanese network products manufacturers signed on to support it. 3M is counting on Taiwan's famed ability to drive down the cost of IT products to help bring optical fiber off the backbone and down to the desktop, curbside and home.
3M expects the alliance to spur expansion of the optical LAN market from 5 million desktops today to more than 60 million desktops in the next three years. VF-45 uses a polymer-coated fiber and a simple, plug-in optical connector that is easily adapted to current LAN networking products.
"The use of VF-45 technology will reduce the cost of fiber LANs by as much as 50 percent," said D.Y. Yang, vice chairman of Winbond Electronics Corp. Yang further predicted a 40 percent drop in prices for fiber network interface cards, a 60 percent decrease for switch port prices and a halving of transceiver prices, "all by next year," as a result of the alliance. The upshot will be expansion of the fiber-based LAN market "from the current $5 billion in sales to $20 billion by 2003," he said.
Solution of choice
A main attraction for the use of optical fiber at the LAN level, Yang said, is the increased need for bandwidth among such applications as Internet video streaming and videoconferencing. "Fiber has nearly unlimited bandwidth," he said. "In fact, fiber can yield 20 to 50 times more bandwidth than copper cabling.
"Optical fiber is now the solution of choice at the WAN level," Yang said. "Implementation of fiber at the LAN level will allow users to break the bottleneck in the last mile of information transfer."
A further attraction of fiber-optic technology is its scalability. "Most current fiber LAN products are 100-Mbit/second up to 1-Gbit/s Ethernet-based," said Chintay Shih, chairman of ITRI. "Fiber optics are easily scalable up to 10 Gbits/s, and several equipment vendors have announced fiber-optic links that can support transmission up to 1 terabit/s utilizing more than 128 DWDM [dense wavelength-division multiplexing] channels."
The 14 Taiwanese network manufacturers supporting the standard displayed VF-45-based products that included switches, routers, hubs, network interface cards (NICs), transceivers, digital cameras, connectors and optic cable. "Taiwan's networking hardware manufacturers supplied some 60 percent of the world's active equipment in 1999," said S.T. King, chairman of Accton Technology Corp. "In 2000, Taiwan's share will continue to grow. Taiwan will produce 70 percent of the world's hubs, 27 percent of the world's switches and 43 percent of the worlds NICs this year."
Taiwan's networking product manufacturers are not known for their ability to drive the market, however. "Taiwan used to have a few networking companies with some brand recognition," said one foreign securities analyst here. "Those days are over now though. They are primarily OEM sources now."
King agreed with that statement but put a different spin on it. "It is true that few of these products have brand names from Taiwanese companies," he said. "But the names these products do carry are very important ones.
"The leaders in the networking market, such as Cisco Systems, Nortel and 3Com, all are partners with Taiwanese networking companies. That means that these new VF-45 products that we are making will be out in the marketplace and will be introduced by these same global leaders."
VF-45 products from Taiwan are due to hit the market next month.
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