Photons and petabits [for Internet traffic]

With Internet traffic doubling every few months, the author reports on one company's plans for averting gridlock in cyberspace. As the demands on the network have soared, driven by the growth of new traffic types and an increasing competitive market place, system complexity is giving way to something more akin to incipient chaos. Market pull and technology push have combined to produce a multi-layered network architecture. This comprises an access layer, IP layer, ATM layer, SDH layer, all overlaid with an optical transport layer.