In 1981, Bill Gates once said that “640k ought to be enough for anybody”, when asked if IBM’s latest PC's 640KB usable RAM limit was capable of dealing with modern demands. It’s a brilliant example of just how difficult it is to predict future technological requirements. When Gates made the now famous remark 21 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that technology would play such an integral part in our everyday lives as it does today.

While technology has undoubtedly been instrumental in improving the lives of billions of people throughout the world, it’s important to remember the colossal demand this trend generates for bandwidth. According to EMC Corporation and analyst house IDC , between 2009 and 2020 worldwide data consumption is expected to grow nearly 45-fold.

This growth will come from a combination of factors. It is estimated internet users alone will increase to 2.7 billion by 2015. This equates to nearly 40 percent of the world’s population and one billion more users than in 2010. More industries too, will begin implementing new technology, opening doors to fascinating and sometimes life-changing applications. The huge rise in data demand has meant it has been critical for existing core networks to be upgraded in order to ensure any capacity issues are addressed and state of the art applications are able to run as efficiently as possible.

100G technology defined

This necessity has given birth to coherent 100G networks, which today are at the forefront of optical fibre technology and are used to carry the combined traffic from thousands of end users across the metro and core networks across the world.

The coherent 100G technology actually allows to transport 100 Gigabits of traffic per second in a single optical channel (or, a “colour” of light). With optical networks capable of running up to 88 channels in parallel, the capacity of a single optical fibre becomes a whopping 8.8 Terabit/s – ten times higher than previous generation technology’s maximum throughput. This new paradigm is becoming the enabler of the internet, connecting together not just cities and countries, but also lying at the heart of fibre optic submarine networks which link continents.

A key attribute of the coherent 100G technology is its ability to work on existing deployed fibre, as well as alongside existing deployed 10G wavelengths. With the huge growth in bandwidth from mobile and fixed broadband, enterprise applications, or the cloud, it is critical to upgrade the core networks, both from a capacity and a reduced cost viewpoint, which 100G can do seamlessly. The dynamic nature of these 100G networks means new paths can be easily and quickly set up as required in order to connect users and organisations together.

100G is responsible for delivering a range of high tech applications, helping service providers upgrade their core network capacity and reduce their cost per bit to cope with the growth in aggregated traffic from the millions of residential and business users that use these networks each year.

It is also a key component in connecting datacentres together (the cloud backbone) to enable big cost savings via datacentre consolidation and virtualization, and delivering services such as hosted storage, backup and restoration, which ensures business continuity and supports disaster recovery. This has also resulted in businesses gaining the flexibility to separate the applications that generate data from data processing and storage.

Drivers of 100G – today’s and tomorrow’s

The world is full of applications which either already utilise 100G networks, or are significant drivers for their wide adoption. Slowly but surely, the globe is changing into a ‘100G Global Connected Village’ of sorts, which connects businesses, industries and people from across the globe and allows closer collaboration and interaction than ever before.

Science already plays an active part in the 100G Connected Village. Scientists from 34 countries currently use data generated by the Large Hadron Collider to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. This gigantic instrument produces about 15 petabytes of data annually – enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual- layer DVDs or 15 stacks the height of Paris’ famous Eifel Tower, much of which runs through 100G networks connecting research centres around the globe where the immense amounts of data are analysed.

Other applications will also be key to driving 100G adoption, both today and into the future. The recent London 2012 Olympic Games, for instance, highlighted the ever growing need for users to stay connected on both fixed and mobile devices via multiple social media methods, as well as the continued growth of bandwidth hungry HD video streaming and our first taste of 3D content.

In the education space, The Open University in The Netherlands has enabled its 22,000 students from around the world to study full time directly from their homes. In Korea, there are plans to replace paper books in elementary schools with digitised ebooks and learning software, as the country’s education sector moves firmly into the 21st Century. Meanwhile in the US, students are able to virtually tour NASA’s headquarters, or watch a live heart surgery.

In the health sector, drivers of 100G abound too – for instance, in the Shandong province in China, more than 100,000 patients have recently taken part in a project to test remote health monitoring devices that instantly record and share their health information with healthcare providers. Academic hospitals also create virtual reality stimulations where doctors across the globe can simultaneously treat a single patient as a team.

Essential upgrades

While projects like these – whether in the world of science, education or business – are still considered somewhat futuristic, each of them already generates immense amounts of data, driving the global adoption of high-capacity networking technologies like 100G. These applications of new technologies give an excellent taste of what is truly possible across a number of different industries – they are just the first step in what can be achieved.

As technology continues to advance at an almost daily rate, it’s only natural that the demand for bandwidth will continue to grow at a rapid pace. In order to deal with this traffic increase, network providers need to be committed to ensuring 100G upgrades of existing networks continue in order to improve capacity and build strongly on the solid foundations of the 100G Connected Village.

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