By OFC
Rounding out Monday morning's Executive Forum panel on key topics in communications infrastructure was Glenn Wellbrock, the director of optical transport planning at Verizon.
Wellbrock began his portion of the morning session by showing some statistics. The company has more than 100 million wireless customers, 17 million FiOS homes, including 5.6 million subscribers to FiOS TV. They also have more than 200 data centers in 24 countries.
In short, he said, it is, “a $127 billion company with a small army working for us.”
But then Wellbrock went on to sound a bugle call warning of impending data demands. He called the internet “relatively mature” and said that there is substantial growth in long-haul networks, with capacity demand continuing to grow in double digits. At the same time revenue is not growing at the same rate—just 1 to 4 percent per year.
“We really are fighting a losing battle here,” he said. “There is substantial growth in the metro networks and in the long-haul networks, and we've got to keep pace with that, and yet folks are not willing to pay significantly more for those bits.”
He asked the audience how they could help Verizon build a smarter network to keep up with this pace. “That's the real problem I'm trying to fix,” he said. “Everything else is a tool to try to solve that.”
He went on to talk about some of these tools, including next-gen network management, showing a slide with the network control of the future. Despite his initial warnings, he remained very upbeat throughout the talk.
"It is going to take a long time to get there," he said, but said he believed we would.
Posted: 23 March 2015 by
OFC
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