NFOEC: No bandwidth glut, executives say
 
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BALTIMORE -- Industry luminaries Monday attempted to debunk the widely held notion that there's a glut of bandwidth in service provider networks, a belief they feel is siphoning off capital for network build-outs.
At the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) here, three keynote speakers refuted reports by analysts and the press that there's excess bandwidth in the core of carrier networks. An executive from Cisco concurred in a separate interview.
Instead, there's excess fiber that's not lit with traffic or services, they say. And a glut of dark fiber does not equate to a glut of bandwidth.
"Saying there's a bandwidth glut is like saying there's too many microprocessors in the world because there's sand on the beach," says Matt Bross, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Williams Communications.
Added David Huber, founder, president and CEO of Corvis, "The press and analysts have done a tremendous disservice in talking about excess bandwidth. It's not true. There isn't a lot of excess bandwidth. There's excess dark fiber."
Nortel's Greg Mumford, president of the company's Optical Internet division, agreed that there's not a bandwidth glut unless the fiber is lit. But he backed off on commenting specifically about a bandwidth glut.
"If they're talking about lit fiber and a glut, that's not a discussion I want to get into," Mumford says. "But if the people talking about a bandwidth glut are talking about fiber, that's an invalid measurement: if it's not lit, it's not bandwidth."
Published reports have it that Qwest, a Nortel customer, recently took the vendor to task for intimating that excess capacity and lack of demand for new bandwidth was contributing to Nortel's financial woes. Mumford says once the current industry "contraction" abates, there will be an uptake in demand for bandwidth.
"How long that contraction lasts, I don't know, but there's demand underneath," he says. Vendors and service providers conducting presentations this week say data traffic is doubling annually.
Corvis' Huber says the perception of excess capacity has helped dry up capital available for equipment purchases, which has led to the economic slump the telecom industry is now going through.
Tellium CEO Harry Carr says the perception of a bandwidth glut has reached the level of urban myth.
"There's a big difference between dark fiber and lit fiber," Carr says, agreeing with the statements of Huber and Bross that there's excess fiber in networks. "Lit fiber is capacity."
"Bandwidth glut is an illusion," Carr adds. The real problem, he says, is that carriers are unable to charge subscribers appropriately for anything but voice.
That point was expanded upon by Carl Russo, Cisco's group vice president for optical networking.
"Do you know anybody making money on streaming video?" Russo asks. "The problem is this small matter of demand. There's more fiber and more systems than there is demand. The pipe is not the problem and not the value."
Bross believes it won't be long before those excess pipes are generating revenue.
"There's not a long-term oversupply that can't be translated into usable services," he says.
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