21 December 2012
OFC/NFOEC is always about the “next generation” of technology, devices, components, systems and networks. It is a venue where major research breakthroughs are presented for the first time and where all new scientific and technology developments are discussed. The term “next-generation” used in the OFC/NFOEC community often indicates what is coming up in the arena of access networks with fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) architectures and the relevant service offerings. In this research area, there is a tendency to use the term “next generation (NG)” for every technology that comes after the currently deployed FTTH networks.
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By Casimer DeCusatis, Ph.D., Distinguished Engineer, IBM System Networking Strategic Alliances, Member, IBM Academy of Technology IBM Corporation | Posted: 18 December 2012
Years ago, the distinction between telecommunications and data communications was pretty clear. Telecommunications referred to moving information (usually voice traffic) over long distances (hundreds or thousands of km), while everything else that stayed within a single data center was called data communication. Long distance voice traffic ran over ATM and SONET protocols, while many data centers contained a mixture of local area networks (Ethernet), storage area networks (Fibre Channel), clustering fabrics (InfiniBand), and other lesser used or proprietary protocols. Today, of course, the line between these two fields is blurry at best, and many people would argue that there really isn’t a meaningful distinction between them any longer. With the advent of new applications such as cloud computing and a renewed interest in long-standing applications such as disaster backup and business continuity, all types of traffic need to run well at extended distances. In this blog, we’ll consider the brave new world of distance-independent networking and protocol agnostic channel extenders using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), a couple of topics that are sure to be widely discussed and debated in the many workshops and panels for OFC/NFOEC 2013.
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By Dr. Ioannis Tomkos | Posted: 13 December 2012
The world we live in is constantly changing. We see big transformations taking place across the globe that affect our lives. In such turbulent times, we all need to be flexible and adapt quickly to new conditions. As Darwin said, it is not the strongest that will survive but the fittest.
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