Graciella, some of my comments in message # 2393 were in response to topics discussed in the following article. FAC
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The Coming Internet Energy Crisis
By Tiernan Ray
biz.yahoo.com
Monday March 26, 6:50 pm Eastern Time
SmartMoney.com - Tech Market
IN THE MIDST of California's energy crisis, Los Angeles spent the better part of last week exploring the effects of disruptive technology. Cars crashed into each other at intersections; hotels imposed a $2.50 energy surcharge; and Jay Leno joked about his economical battery-powered automobile on ``The Tonight Show.'' And, oh, yes, down in Anaheim, where Space Mountain apparently kept running just fine, 38,000 engineers, scientists, chief executives, marketing types and journalists packed the local convention center to ponder another sort of disruptive technology — the coming shift in fiber-communications systems from today's standard of 10 billion bits a second to the next awesome speed grade, 40 billion bits a second.
While they're regarded as still at least a couple of years from commercial deployment, prototype 40 gigabit systems are just now showing up at conventions like this one. There are many technical challenges to be overcome: More and more energy must be pumped into a fiber to make data travel at such speeds, and all manner of strange things happen in optical physics at high energies.
But as California's electricity woes are reminding us, high energy use has its problems. And as new optical-networking technologies emerge to propel data transfer at ever higher speeds, the Internet is facing an energy crisis of its own. So while many of the engineering types at the annual Optical Fiber Conference pondered ``nonlinearities'' like light polarization, dispersion and four-wave mixing, a few folks were worrying about the high cost of high-energy physics. ``Phone companies haven't even begun to think about the energy cost of all this equipment,'' said David Huber, chairman and CEO of Corvis (NASDAQ:CORV - news), referring to the large optical switches that he and his competitors are building.
Indeed, the cost to run some of the emerging networking equipment just now being installed in phone-company networks is staggering. Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN - news) rates its CoreDirector, a product that has met with some commercial success, at an energy consumption of about 6.2 kilowatts when switching 640 billion bits of traffic a second.
As it happens, Huber has a clear interest in emphasizing energy consumption. Corvis's switch product is vastly more efficient than Ciena's, since it can switch roughly four times as much data, or 2.4 terabits (trillions of bits) a second, at only 6.5 kilowatts. How does it manage that? The Corvis switch doesn't use electronics to ``read'' each bit that enters the switch, so the switch draws less power. This is the argument for much of what's called the all-optical Internet: Because most optical components are passive, meaning they move data without applied electricity, they should use less energy overall.
No wonder power consumption was a touchy issue for most of the vendors showing off gigantic stacks of optical switches on the show floor. Representatives for Tellium, another vendor of electronic switches that's currently in registration to sell shares to the public, wouldn't disclose the power usage of their switch. Ditto for Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO - news), which was showing off switches the size and shape of outhouses. Officials at the Nortel Networks (NYSE:NT - news) booth, which debuted the company's PDX and HDX switches, refused to disclose numbers, either. Off the show floor, however, Rajiv Ramaswami, who developed the PDX switch, which uses tiny mirrors, said the product will consume about three to four kilowatts when switching one thousand channels of light. That's comparable to Corvis's product, and even uses a little less energy. The PDX, which was developed after Nortel's acquisition of Ramaswami's company Xros for around $3.2 billion last year, is still in phone-company trials.
Ramaswami and Huber have reason to hope for a power crisis as the Internet evolves — and they may get their wish. Increasing speeds to 40 billion bits a second, and increasing the number of wavelengths of light inside of a dense wavelength division multiplexing, or DWDM, system, will require more pumped power in each fiber and more heat-generating electronics to switch each bit of traffic.
Down the road, scientists are discussing the prospect that optical physics, not digital information, will control the Internet, which could up the ante. For example, Mari Maeda, a director of research with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (that's DARPA, the folks who built the Internet), gave a talk on Tuesday that outlined a future high-bit-rate Internet dedicated to multimedia transfers between millions of different connected devices. Maeda said very large data files, such as MP3 audio snippets and feature-length films, might be transmitted in bursts of high-speed optical pulses, rather than as small files that are assembled via various codes. That would mean that some form of high-energy, high-bit-rate optical transmission is the inevitable future of today's fiber optics.
If Maeda is right, high-energy physics is the future of the Internet. If Huber and Ramaswami are right, the effects of swelling energy consumption are already being felt in increasing power costs. And if both of these trends coalesce, then Nortel and Corvis and other optical networkers may have truly disruptive technologies to offer: Products that prove the current crop of networking approaches are far too power hungry and therefore inadequate to carry the increasing volumes of data coursing through the Internet. When asked if he was frustrated, perhaps, by what seemed to be phone companies' ignorance of the power issues in networking, Huber gave a little smile. ``They'll care about it when they can't get the power anymore to run things.''
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