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Technology Stocks : Ciena (CIEN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nghi vu who wrote (1724)	3/12/1998 9:23:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12623

Network Outlook: Bandwidth will boom Are you ready for photonic networking? 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.