Re: Ray - BANDWIDTH ASSESMENT
It's refreshing to see that you summed up the Entire Fiber Optics Industry and it's future into an unexciting and typical Commodity Market paragraph. <g>
Re: Guess where Fiber Companies are going in the next Decade.
I'd guess a period of consolidation as the industry matures. Components will have to become planarized and their production automated. Thus, companies like NEWP will play a very important role. Many of the smaller FO shops will take technology dead-ends. Many companies will be starved for capital after the initial orgy of money that is flowing into the industry today. Valuations will normalize as Mr. Market starts to view fiber optics as just another part of a normal economy, instead of a revolutionary breakthrough with an exciting story.
It's amazing to see someone summing up the millions of hours that have gone into the development and advancements in Fiber Optics, Optics, Lasers, WDM, DWDM,TDM, EDFAs wavelength multiplexing, etc. in a paragraph that makes one yawn, but then one could assume you do not have a Technical Background, and are sucked into an Old World Economics Blackhole.
Until one comprehends the technology and magnitude of it all, one cannot begin to understand where it is going.
Here's one small piece to help everyone understand "The Magnitude of it All"
The rate of growth for bandwidth, dwarfs Moore's Law, more like comparing a Bottle Rocket to the Space Shuttle. Doubling every three to four months, bandwidth is advancing at least four times the 18 month pace of Micro Processors.
Now pay close attention to the following Numbers:
Each Fiber Thread, the width of a human hair, can carry a thousand times more information on one path than all the current wireless technologies put together, running from AM radio to Broadcast Satellite., that spectrum today equals a total of some 25 billion hertz or 25 gigahertz, in scientific notation 25 times 10 to the 9th.
The capacity of a fiber optic cable having some 864 individual fibers - is measured in petahertz 10 to the 15th waves per second. Petahertz signifies a million gigahertz.
As I sit here at a Launch Console awaiting the Launch of an Atlas II, which is deploying yet another minute spec of bandwidth to the heavens (a Joint Military Communications Satellite), I hope that the above Numbers and Information find their way to the Gray Matter of many of you, and help you understand the immensity of the point I'm trying to make about Bandwidth and Fiber Optics.
Re: Bandwidth is a Commodity, and like Oil, the Optic Sheiks will not see a Ceiling on Wealth and Valuation.
The same was said about radio in 1928, about railroads in 1872, about tulips in 1634. The difference between oil and bandwidth is fundamental. Oil is a non-renewable resource that becomes ever more expensive to recover.
Bandwidth is completely renewable (so much so the concept hardly applies) and expandable as we see it today, and will be available at a declining price point for the foreseeable future. While the oil companies have a strict discipline about profitability, this is not the case in the telecommunications industry, which seems caught up in a competitive frenzy for market share that is, frankly, starting to frighten the bondsmen who are financing this industry.
As I see it, the only companies that I need to pay attention to as possible investments are those with unassailable intellectual property rights, legions of advanced researchers and a lock on future developments. I see none today, as the tendency in the industry is for one technology to leapfrog another, and thus obsolete the fleeting advantage of the prior leaders.
Perhaps I'll have a few minutes to reply to the above comments, and show where your views are somewhat flawed, while sitting at this Console on Sunday awaiting the Landing of Space Shuttle Discovery.
T-00:05:00 and counting
10/19/00 8:35 pm
Regards,
JW@KSC |
