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As the head of a bandwidth assessment group at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers) and past chairman of the IEEE's task force on 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit per second
Ethernet, John D'Ambrosia is among the people who will help guide the world toward 400
Gigabit and even Terabit per second speeds. But will our capacity to deliver bandwidth keep up
with the human race's ability to consume it?
"That's the question that keeps me up at night," said D'Ambrosia, who is also chairman of the
Ethernet Alliance industry group and an engineering executive at Dell. "When we were doing the
100 Gigabit project, people were saying as soon as you get 100 Gigabit done, you need to start
working on the next speed. We're past that knee of the curve and we're getting into real
exponential growth."
An estimated one-third of the world's population is online now, a proportion that is sure to grow.
More users, more devices that connect to networks, and more data-heavy services to ride over
the pipes are causing a bandwidth explosion, DAmbrosia said. The data reviewed by his IEEE
committees over the past few years indicates that bandwidth demand is growing faster than our
capacity to deliver it.
But plenty of organizations are at work on the next generation of Internet and networking
technologies, and they provide reason for optimism. The data explosion may not become a giant
bottleneck thanks to continued research of the kind profiled below, which has already led to big
advances in undersea cables, software-defined networking, and the research-oriented Internet 2
network.
Submarine cables
With the proliferation of mobile devices, its easy to think were living in an all-wireless world.
But the haphazard jumble of cables in my house proves otherwise, and thats only the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to physical network infrastructure.
So many people think the Internet is mobile, its wireless, said Alan Mauldin, a research
director at telecom market research firm TeleGeography. Yeah, its wireless until it goes to the
cell tower or to the WiFi base station. From there it's all physical. There are cables underground,
cables in the ocean, that all link together to give us a global Internet. Its really just the edges of
the network where youre able to see wireless and mobile technologies.
Mauldin studies trends in undersea cables, and he has good news about the growth in capacity on
this front. While the cables running under the worlds oceans dont address the issue of bringing
Internet capacity to far-flung urban regions, they're crucial for carrying traffic between countries
and continents.
We focus on undersea cables because thats the primary way that international communications
happen, Mauldin said. Satellites havent been a real big part of the picture for intercontinental
connectivity in quite some time.
As you can see in the chart below, international bandwidth availability has soared ("used
bandwidth" refers to the capacity deployed by providers, rather than bandwidth consumed by end
users). From 1.4 terabits per second in 2002, it steadily climbed to 6.7 terabits in 2006 and has
now reached 92.1 terabits per second. TeleGeography expects that number to hit 606.6 terabits
per second in 2018 and 1,103.3 terabits per second in 2020.
terabits per second, Africa had less than a terabit per second700 gigabits. (These numbers, you
may have noticed, add up to a higher total than the worldwide connectivitythat's because of
some overlap. For example, trans-Atlantic capacity counts toward both the European and
US/Canada totals.)
More undersea cables are being built. Consider one $1.5 billion project to reduce latency
between London and Tokyo by 60 milliseconds with whats described as the first ever transArctic Ocean submarine fiber optic cables.
Source:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/bandwidth-explosion-as-internet-use-soars-canbottlenecks-be-averted/