October 23, 2009Wednesday the traffic was okay; Thursday it wasn't as good. Now, on Friday, it's a ghost town, with exhibitors itching to tear their booths down because the unions don't work on the weekend and they need to be out by the end of the day. Welcome to Supercomm 2009!
Major optically related themes here at the show are mobile backhaul (synchronization capabilities based on 1588v2 and Synchronous Ethernet -- both providing them and testing them -- are big), service management, and packet optical transport. A fair amount of discussion about 100G, particularly when it might be deployed in more than one link. Estimates range from 2011 to years afterward.
For you numbers junkies, Cisco issued some interesting statistics via its Visual Networking Index Usage study. They estimate that the average broadband connection generates 11.4 Gbytes of Internet traffic a month. They see overall broadband Internet usage climbing 5X between 2008 and 2013. However, they say carriers will have to engineer their networks to handle 7X for peak usage, which generally occurs between 9 PM and 1 AM.
