[CAnet - news] The fallacy of bandwidth on demand

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
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[Some excerpts from my opinion piece at Internet Evolution -- BSA]

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=506&doc_id=146268&

Around the world, many National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are
focusing on various bandwidth-on-demand schemes for the future Internet
architecture that will be used primarily for big science and
cyber-infrastructure applications. The assumption is that in the future, big
science institutions will produce such volumes of data that this traffic
alone will easily exceed the capacity of today's optical networks. If you
think you have heard this story before, you're right. 

These same arguments were used to justify the need for ISDN (Integrated
Services Digital Network), ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), GMPLS
(Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching), and QoS (Quality of Service).
These technologies were also premised on the assumption that network
capacity would never be able to keep up with demand. Ergo, you needed an
"intelligent" network to anticipate the applications demand for bandwidth. 

Once again, we are hearing the same old litany that we need optical switched
networks and optical bandwidth on demand as networks will be unable to keep
up with anticipated traffic growth, especially for big science. 

The fact is, no evidence exists yet that big science traffic volumes, or for
that matter Internet traffic volumes, are growing anywhere near what was
forecast, even just a few short years ago. 

[...]
Combined with the slow ramp-up of big science traffic volumes, the business
case for optical bandwidth on demand is also challenged by new optical
network technology, which will dramatically increase existing optical
networks by several orders of magnitude. Vendors like Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:
ALU), Nortel Networks Ltd. (NYSE/Toronto: NT), Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN),
and Infinera Corp. (Nasdaq: INFN) are developing next-generation optical
networks using a new technique called coherent optical technology. 

This will allow in field upgrades of existing optical networks to carry 100
Gigabits per wavelength using existing 10 Gigabit wavelength channels. The
vendors expect that this can be accomplished without any changes to the core
of network, such as optical repeaters, fiber, etc. Research into coherent
optical technology is only at its infancy. Even more dramatic jumps in
network will probably be announced in the coming years. 

The argument for bandwidth on demand is further undermined with the advent
of the new commercial "cloud" services offered by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG),
Amazon, and others. Increasingly, big science and computation will move to
these clouds for convenience, cost, and ease of use. Just like clouds allow
the creation of shared work spaces and obviate the need for users to email
document attachments to all and sundry, they will also minimize the need to
ship big science and data files back and forth across NRENs. All computation
and data will be accessible locally, regardless of where the researcher is
located. 

[..]


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