Interesting. In '96 they were saying that Frame Relay would peak and sustain as the dominant form of transport for the next decade. Frame is a Layer 2 protocol, of course, which rides above SONET.
Frame has done well, but it's future status as king of the packet hill is questionable. While Frame supports IP (upstairs), PPP and other lower layer line formats are already beginning to take share away from enterprise and inter-carrier IP support.
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One of the reasons SONET may well sustain itself in the idiom that the author suggests (as the dominant form of transport for another decade) is GbE and 10GbE. If these do, indeed, become encapsulated in OC192s, then it's a sure bet that SONET isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I suspect that 100GbE may not find as friendly a home in SONET as 10Gb did. 10G just happens to be both the next power of 10 over 1 GbE, AND very close to the clock rate and throughput of OC192, which is just a hair under 10Gb.
Today state of the art is OC-192 at 10 Mb/s. Upgrades in SONET usually take place at a factor of 4, not 10. So that 40 Gb or OC-768 would be the next step up from today's OC192, and beyond that 160 Gb/s, or OC-3072.
These are not gains via WDM. Rather, they assume that vendors will continue to increase the basic TDM rates in their SONET systems, which is a whole other discussion. Needless to say, most high end vendors will be increasing both their basic TDM clock rates in their high-end SONET add-drop multiplexers and end nodes, _as_well_as_ their WDM capabilities, to meet a wide range of service provider requirements.
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