3/11/98 Network World article "Network Outlook: Bandwidth will boom. Are you ready for photonic networking? [And the solution is...]
nwfusion.com
Excerpt: "Bandwidth will cease to be an issue for corporations in the next year or two," said Paul Johnson, a research analyst at BancAmerica Robertson Stephens, a San Francisco-based investment bank."
Excerpt: "While customers won't likely turn their noses up at more LAN and campus
network bandwidth, the real bandwidth need is for remote access
connectivity, said Paul Callahan, vice president of business development for
Bay Networks, Inc. As LAN speeds shot up from 10M bit/sec to 100M bit/sec, modem speeds
only doubled from about 14.4K bit/sec to 28K bit/sec, Callahan said. Then
as LAN speeds skyrocketed to 1G bit/sec, modem speeds again only
doubled to 56K bit/sec, he said.
Callahan called this "bandwidth gulch" between LAN speeds and WAN
speeds "probably the biggest issue facing the industry today.""
By Bob Brown
Network World, 3/11/98
Burlingame, Calif. - Users won't be singing the
bandwidth blues for much longer, according to
speakers at this week's Network Outlook conference
here.
"Bandwidth will cease to be an issue for corporations
in the next year or two," said Paul Johnson, a
research analyst at BancAmerica Robertson
Stephens, a San Francisco-based investment bank.
On the carrier side, wave division multiplexing
(WDM) and digital subscriber line technologies will
boost available bandwidth in carrier nets and enable
carriers to offer customers cheaper high-speed
services, Johnson said. On corporate networks,
freefalling switch and network interface card prices
should allow companies to bring dedicated 10M
bit/sec or 100M bit/sec pipes to every desktop over
the next couple of years, he said.
"No one will have any less than that...it's just too
inexpensive," Johnson said. He expects corporations
to tie their 10/100M bit/sec networks together with Gigabit Ethernet
backbones in most cases, but with ATM backbones where network
architectures are more complex.
And speakers at this two day conference, attended largely by start-up
CEOs, venture capitalists and investment bankers, were't just singing the
praises of megabits and gigabits.
Users should prepare for the "Tera Era," according to Waguih Ishak,
director of communications and the optical research laboratory at
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Ishak was one of four panelists discussing the merits of photonic
networking, a technology based on zipping around data via light rather than
electronics. Photonics is already a significant phenomenon in carrier
networks, as service providers look to rebuild their networks to handle
amazingly high traffic growth rates. But Ishak said that photonic devices
could start working their way into enterprise networks within the next few
years, resulting in switched backbones carrying tens or even hundreds of
gigabits of traffiic. Companies could deliver up to a gigabit of data to a
desktop over a single wavelength, he said.
While customers won't likely turn their noses up at more LAN and campus
network bandwidth, the real bandwidth need is for remote access
connectivity, said Paul Callahan, vice president of business development for
Bay Networks, Inc.
As LAN speeds shot up from 10M bit/sec to 100M bit/sec, modem speeds
only doubled from about 14.4K bit/sec to 28K bit/sec, Callahan said. Then
as LAN speeds skyrocketed to 1G bit/sec, modem speeds again only
doubled to 56K bit/sec, he said.
Callahan called this "bandwidth gulch" between LAN speeds and WAN
speeds "probably the biggest issue facing the industry today."
Callahan's guess is that cable modem technology will go a long way toward
solving the problem, while he said DSL may get bogged down as emerging
participants in that market fight over which version of DSL is best. Many of
the emerging DSL product and service suppliers will fall by the wayside
over the next couple of years as a result of the industry throwing this
"complexity fit," he said.
Callahan said the days may be numbered for independent vendors pitching
Gigabit Ethernet products, too.
"If you've invested in a routing switch company that has been acquired by
one of the major brands, [your routing switch company] isn't going
anywhere," he said.
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