Demand for data: more, more, faster, faster
Fiber optics light the way for rapid growth of the Internet
Posted at 11:32 p.m. PDT Monday, May 3, 1999
sjmercury.com
BY JON HEALEY
Mercury News Staff Writer
THE Industrial Revolution was powered by steam and electricity. The Internet Revolution, on the other hand, is being driven by light.
The breathtaking growth of the Internet and data communications is tied in part to a phenomenal expansion of the telephone networks. That expansion has been fueled by rapid advances in fiber optics, which use pulses of light to transmit information through hair-thin strands of glass at, well, the speed of light.
To get an idea how vast the increase in capacity is, consider these statistics. Cyberspace pundit George Gilder estimates that in 1994, the entire global communications network could transmit an average of about 1 trillion pieces of digital data per second. Today, Nortel Networks is expected to announce that it can move 1.6 trillion pieces of data on a single fiber optic strand with each tick of the clock.
The expansion in capacity -- or ''bandwidth,'' as the communications industry calls it -- is both responding to and accelerating the craving for data. It's the law of supply and demand at work: As new technologies make vastly more bandwidth available at the heart of the network, the cost of moving information has plummeted.
''Our customers are taking the position, 'Just bring it on,' '' said Bill Gartner, vice president of optical networking product development for Lucent Technologies.
The capacity breakthroughs have happened mainly on the long-distance ''backbone'' of the communications networks, not on the average user's Internet connection. The direct beneficiaries are large corporations, Internet service providers and phone companies.
The payoff for the general public comes through the resulting overall growth of the Internet, which is transforming the way we live, work, learn and entertain ourselves. Among other things, that translates into the availability of more goods and services from around the world, new opportunities to work close to home, and closer ties to far-flung relatives and friends.
Not every part of the communications network is running at record-breaking speed, even in the long-distance backbone. But the speed limits are being attacked on a number of fronts, leading some industry executives to say that there's no end in sight to the demand for bigger, faster data pipelines.
Just ''the warm-up act''
''The scary part is, we believe that the growth that we've seen so far is actually the warm-up act,'' said Michael O'Dell, vice president and chief scientist for UUNET, the division of MCI WorldCom that carries the largest amount of Internet backbone data. ''We're well past the 'If-we-build-it-they-will-come' model. We're in the 'Oh-my-God-they're-still-coming!' model.''
The first 20th-century phone networks were built mainly out of copper wires, which are well-suited to the task of carrying an ordinary local call. As the number of calls grew over the years, the phone networks bulked up their backbones with larger and better insulated coaxial cables, microwave radios and satellite links.
Systems built for phone calls were ill-suited to the rising tide of data, which had grown to a significant portion of network traffic by the early 1990s. Even with more efficient transmission techniques, the phone networks needed more capacity.
It was the development of solid-state lasers in the late 1960s and pure silica fiber-optic cables in 1970 that opened a new avenue for transmitting information: tapping out a digital code using pulses of light.
Today, fiber optics are at the heart of all the long-distance networks and much of the local ones, both for telephone and cable TV service. They are the arteries that gather communications signals pumped to and from widespread homes and businesses, whether it be a phone call from San Jose to Chicago, a burst of withdrawal and deposit data on a private line between bank branches in New York and Miami or a Web page downloaded from a site in Denver to a computer in Dallas.
And the number of fibers deployed continues to grow as upstart communications companies build networks from scratch. These companies -- including Qwest Communications International Inc., Williams Communications and IXC Communications Inc. -- have so much capacity in their networks that they can offer bandwidth for a fraction of what an old hand like AT&T charges.
Wired for success
Glass strands have many advantages over their copper and coaxial-cable counterparts. Fiber optics are more compact, can transmit a signal farther and are less subject to interference. Their lasers can transmit much more information per second through glass than a radio wave can through copper or air.
Most important, the capacity of fiber optics is increasing rapidly, thanks to two techniques that enable the lasers to cram more information down each strand.
First, the speed of the pulses is increasing. Lasers are like semaphore signals -- they pulse on and off at varying intervals, flashing a code that translates into the ''ones'' and ''zeros'' of computer language. The faster the pulse, the more information conveyed.
Second, researchers have developed ways to send different colors of infrared light simultaneously down a single strand, with each color pulsing out its own code. This technique is called Wave Division Multiplexing. At the receiving end, a prism separates the colors so that each stream of digital data can be decoded.
Such advances are doubling the performance of fiber-optic networks every nine to 12 months, said John Roth, president and chief executive of Nortel, the leading supplier of fiber-optic equipment in North America.
Roth's Canada-based company is pushing Wave Division Multiplexing to new heights, sending 160 colors of light, each carrying 10 billion bits of information per second, down one strand -- 640 times more bandwidth than could be achieved five years ago. Scheduled for trial runs later this year and commercial deployment in 2000, this technology could ship the entire contents of the Library of Congress to New York on a single piece of glass in 14 seconds.
Mat Steinberg, a top fiber-optic analyst for consulting firm Ryan Hankin Kent Inc. of South San Francisco, said Nortel has the technology lead -- this week. Other competitors are racing ahead with their own fiber-optic advancements, which promise to drive the number of colors and the speed of the lasers even further.
For example, Lucent Technologies is trying out a laser four times as fast as Nortel's, with plans to make it available in the first quarter of next year.
Still a way to go
Now for the reality check.
Most of the links in U.S. communications networks aren't running at anything close to top speeds. Even on the new state-of-the-art long-distance networks, the electronic equipment needed to direct data traffic can't keep pace with the fiber optics, topping out at less than one-fourth the speed of today's fastest lasers.
Still, increasing speed and capacity on the fiber-optic backbones is critical to boosting speed and capacity everywhere else. That's because the backbones, like interstate highways, have to carry traffic from multiple sources. If they're not big enough to handle all the data being pumped in as soon as it arrives, traffic will back up at the entry points and stall.
The explosive growth in capacity has radically changed the economics of sending and receiving data.
The cost of bandwidth has dropped 99 percent over the past decade, Roth said, and it will drop another 99 percent in the coming decade. So instead of viewing bandwidth as a scarce and expensive resource that had to be conserved, companies are beginning to consume it lavishly.
Nortel, for example, maintains a far-flung global workforce that routinely ships massive amounts of information from office to office over the communications network. ''It's now possible to move work to where the people are, instead of moving people to the work,'' Roth said.
The availability of cheap bandwidth is having at least two profound effects on businesses, both of which drive the demand. It also has a real impact on workers and consumers.
First, it's causing companies to shift many of their core functions -- design, marketing, sales, distribution and customer support -- to cyberspace as a way to cut costs.
O'Dell of UUNET noted how one Silicon Valley company saved $4 million on printing costs just by putting information about its designs onto the Web instead of onto paper. ''That's without selling a bloody thing,'' he added.
Many businesses are starting to go one step further, said Lewis O. Wilks, president of Internet and multimedia markets for Qwest. They're turning over critical management and operational functions to Web-based contractors, who now can afford the large amounts of bandwidth needed to provide those services reliably.
For small and mid-sized companies in particular, the Internet has become a cost-cutting tool and a competitive advantage, Wilks said. ''There isn't a segment of the marketplace,'' he added, ''that isn't rushing to change their business model.''
The second effect of the bandwidth boom is the advent of products and services that weren't possible before.
For example, take the phenomenon of MP3, a format for recording, storing and copying music on a computer. ''Now you have college kids transferring very large audio files because they can -- at very high speed, very inexpensively,'' said John Seamster, director of marketing for Conxion Corp. of Santa Clara. ''And it's completely redefining the music industry.''
There's also telemedicine, as illustrated by Texas-based VidiMedix Corp. VidiMedix is using high-capacity connections from IXC Communications to allow doctors in central locations to care for patients in remote and rural areas. The doctors use Internet-based video and data to examine, diagnose and treat patients from afar -- a technique that used to require dedicated phone lines, which were too expensive to be practical in many areas.
As businesses have flocked to the Internet, so have consumers. The two trends feed off each other -- the more that's made available over the Web, the more people are drawn to it, creating a larger audience that leads companies to put more products and services online.
Most data transmitted today travels not on the Internet but on private corporate networks -- for example, the links between automatic teller machines and the bank's central office, or the lines tying a Fortune 500 company's headquarters to its branch offices. The amount of traffic on those networks is growing rapidly -- 15 percent to 30 percent per year, Greg Mumford of Nortel estimated.
Still, the Internet is growing far faster, forcing a mind-boggling expansion in bandwidth. Officials at UUNET say that the capacity of that backbone has been doubling every 100 days for three or four years.
How far can it go?
If that pace keeps up, the Internet will take up more than 90 percent of the world's communications capacity by 2003, and more than 99 percent by 2004, UUNET chief John W. Sidgmore has said.
Until people can interact over a network as quickly and easily as they can sitting across the table from one another, there will continue to be a demand for bigger, faster networks, said Scott Kriens of Mountain View-based Juniper Networks, a high-speed data equipment supplier. ''We're completely convinced that bandwidth demand goes up as far as the eye can see.''
But how much more data can be pushed down a strand of fiber?
''There are theoretical limits,'' said Lucent's Gartner. ''We're nowhere near them.''
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