8:20 AM -- ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Another OFC/NFOEC in the land of mouse ears and rental minivans...
Here's an interesting point from the The Optical Society (OSA) (OSA) Executive Forum, yesterday's preview conference to OFC/NFOEC. Andrew Schmitt of Nyquist Capital asked a service-provider panel what they're doing now that peer-to-peer (P2P) represents most of the traffic on their networks.
All four denied the "most" part, but they agreed P2P video is an up-and-coming bandwidth eater. (See P2P Camp Swarms Video.)
Whether they need to do anything about it is, judging by the varying responses, debatable.
"It is probably the portion of our video traffic that is growing at the fastest clip... The pressure on the upstream network is why we are paying a lot of attention to it." — Ernie Carey, VP advanced network technologies, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T)
"We don't see a huge amount at the moment, but that's going to be the major growth, and we've got to have the network to handle it." — Dave Payne, manager of broadband architectures and optical networks, BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA)
"Yes, upstream is going up, but downstream is going up as well... [The ratio of 1:4 download:upload amounts] hasn't significantly changed over the last three years; there is a slope to that curve, but it's not significant." — Vik Saxena, senior director of network architecture, Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK)
"If you can find enough uplink speed, which is what we've done with fiber-to-the-home, then that [question] goes away." — Glenn Wellbrock, director of backbone network design, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)
I should also note there was a surprise (to me) appearance by Georgio Anania, formerly of Bookham Inc. (Nasdaq: BKHM; London: BHM). I've got some Q&A fodder I may post later today.
— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading