(OK, today I’m distracted; see the origins of K-I-S-S at the bottom of this post.)
I attended the plenary session at OSA’s OFC/NFOEC conference in sunny San Diego this morning – I’m overlooking the harbor now. It has been at least five and perhaps even seven years since I was last here at OFC. As with most good plenary sessions, I came away with all sorts of trivia and even some perspective – where to begin?
I will save the distraction for a moment and see if I can fill out this post with facts of the past, present, and future as it relates to the rise of global and personal communications. Some of the numbers are staggering. I expect many readers were caught up in the frenzy of telecom and that many have not looked back since the crash. My recollections are that we designed our first WDM (wavelength division multiplexer) for a government research center in 1997, based on a large glass prism. Shortly thereafter, I found myself writing an 80-page proposal to the ATP program for a few million dollars to advance free-space optics modeling. In spite of having nearly no idea what I was writing about, as this was the early days, and the fact that I wrote the proposal alone in a hotel over a 60-hour sleepless stretch (haven’t done that again), we won. Following this, I had the clever idea that many people would be interested in glass prototype micro-optics, and so we bought an optics shop in the U.S. that made endoscopes. With that, we were on the train. I spent the next three years on the road (40 weeks a year) and yes, we even exhibited at OFC in 2001, I believe. Our engineering group saw our telecom design business grow from that first job in 1997 to 30% of our business at the time of the crash, in June 2001 as I recall. Well, that was then.
In touring the remains of the industry at the show today, I was telling my colleague that it’s like the telecom giants woke up one morning, looked around, and stepped on all the ants that were swarming around them. Today I heard three names consistently: Verizon, ATT (yes, they seem to be back), and Alcatel. And apparently JDSU is hiring. The displays are old and tired, there are a lot of empty spaces, and in general, I’d say the status quo prevailed into the end.
But here are some of the plenary numbers. When ARPAnet was invented in 1963, it connected UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah. In 1969, as I’m entering high school, the first DNS was assigned. Today there are 500,000,000 of those (assuming DNS is a noun, I didn’t look up what it means). If that doesn’t work, that number is also attributed to the number of Internet nodes. In 1980, as I exited graduate school, there were 0 mobile phones. Today, there are 2,500,000,000 of those. I heard in the hall today, or was it yesterday, FLICKR (a photo upload site?, don’t know, haven’t been there, yet) had its 1,000,000,000th transfer, at the same time the current run rate is 1,000,000,000/year. Now that’s a growth rate. I don’t think they get $0.01, but, if they did….
An interesting plot showed that in the early 60’s the world had 2.3 billion people, and if I understood the plot, a significant percentage of them lived in “developed” countries. In 2013, there will still be about 2 billion people in the developed countries, and 6 billion in the developing countries. The growth rate for the developed countries is flat.
You’ve seen hockey stick growth projections. But have you ever seen it actually occur? I may get the units wrong here – in 1993, the Internet appears to the average techie, defining the start of data flow. By 2000, 6,200,000,000 GB of data is transferring per year, or per day/hour/minute/sec, not sure which. (Note: GB already has 9 zeroes). In 2011, we’re going to see a data rate of 1,800,000,000,000 GB. Now that is a hockey stick. Based on conservative projections, the data rate in 2020 will be in units of Petabits/sec (those come after Terabits, which come after Gigabits, or GB). According to the third speaker in the plenary session, if we don’t rethink the architecture before 2020 (that’s in 10 years), it will require the entire output of a nuclear power plant (a really big number of Kw) to drive the routers needed, based on current technology. No wonder the word energy efficiency comes up.
I do recall when I last paid attention, the Holy Grail was 100Gbit data rates. Many predicted it could not happen. But the big announcement (OK, maybe just a big announcement) was that a 100Gbit routing would be brought online this year. Apparently “coherent technology” has solved the challenge of transferring at these data rates without starting over. So now they’re talking of 100Gbit routing to small companies before I retire, and to my home shortly thereafter. So, what I think will be fun is reflected in a talk I heard in early 2000 by a telecom executive. He was having fun putting an early webcam on his dog, with a wireless unit, and then during the day turning it on to see where the doggie was. His thinking was, eventually (which appears to be soon), you enter a GPS coordinate somewhere in the world, and you are routed to the nearest webcam from which you can view life, live – sounds neat. I can imagine the end of travel, or will it be the beginning of armchair travel. Once you have your immersive, full surround 3-D TV, you sign up for the trip down the Amazon consisting of a live feed to a surround of cameras on a boat outfitted for the purpose – could be interesting.
OK, before exceeding the space here on this blog post, the distraction I referred to earlier. A speaker attributed the term Keep It Simple Stupid to one David S. Isenberg. So, who could resist, I Googled (a term still not in my spell checker). The answer is no, it was not him, but if you’re into telecom, you should check him out at www.isen.com. You will find there, at least today, the following interesting graphic.
It turns out the right answer is Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, 40 years with the Lockheed Skunk Works – courtesy of Wikipedia. Also worth a short visit if you’re a Skunk Works fan.
