OFC: Not so doom and gloom

I’m writing this post from the annual OFC/NFOEC convention in San Diego. Despite the current economic conditions, the conference is not the meeting of the doom and gloom society that it was in 2002 and 2003. Then, the gloomy atmosphere came because the telecom industry had deployed too much fiber prior to the Internet bubble burst of 2001. At that time, industry pundits were predicting the Internet traffic would eventually consume the excess bandwidth, which has happened. You can thank more cell phones, social networking, and especially YouTube for that.

Yesterday, some speakers at a panel discussion were predicting significant traffic growth, mostly driven by video, be it gaming, HD, or 3D. But this time, there is more caution that there was ten years ago. Still, service providers are moving ahead with deployment. At a panel discussion yesterday, Professor Andrew Oldyzko of the University of Minnesota implied that traffic grwoth was not sufficient to keep up with network expansion. Although Oldyzko stopped short of predicting the next Internet bubble burst, you could interpret his remarks that way. You can read more about the discussion shortly, once it’s posted at tmworld.com. I’ll add the link to this post when it’s available.

I leave OFC in a few hours and head north to Anaheim to cover the Measurement Science Conference, a striking difference from OFC. OFC is a large conference, drawing thousands who talk about the latest telecommunications technology. Measurement Science draw the much smaller calibration crowd, to whom the latest technolgy is unproven.