High-speed transmission

Service providers are struggling to meet the unprecedented growth of data services in today's telecommunications networks and are currently limited by a public backbone network optimally designed for circuit (voice) transmission. In the future, networks will continue to be shared between static voice circuits and increasing amounts of dynamic traffic that is often referred to as packet, IP, or data traffic. This mixture of traffic puts new requirements on the design of core public networks and stresses their ability to scale to meet capacity demand at backbone distances. When bandwidth hungry applications such as cable modem, Storage Area Networks (SANs), and peer-to-peer networking become commonplace in access networks, the wide-area network or core network will need to respond by operating much more like a LAN in terms of being flexible and data ready. These future networks must support high capacity IP networking across backbone distances, and system vendors must provide reliable and cost-effective ultrafast long haul optical transmission as the first step to realizing the promise of flexible optical networking.