FO networks aren't a good example. People outside the industry don't understand that a lack of capacity in the metro and last mile has caused the illusion of over capacity in the long haul. This is due to the regulatory BS of the Telecommunications Act of "96". With the deployment of DWDM, bandwidth is designed to be abundant and cheap, but people have to have access to it at reasonable costs...
DWDM is deflating the value of older networks because they can be built now for a fraction of the cost: It has nothing to do with pricing power. With AVNX's PowerMux, were seeing 160 channel systems from Nortel (Optera) and 176 channels from Fujitsu. When I first worked for GENU, our network had 4. Now, you can lease an entire lambda from a carrier.
Interestingly, the vision of AVNX is 500,000 lambdas per fiber, and they say we need it for access rather than bandwidth. Routers will virtually disappear and the network will OADM, virtually reverting it back to a circuit network vs. a packet network. Back to the Future!
Here's another tidbit for the naysayers of the optical revolution; the metro buildout will be 25x the cost and time of the long haul build. |
