Standards Bring More Flexibility to Optical Transport
01 January 2003
About four years ago consensus emerged among major market researchers indicating, that while voice traffic continues to grow at a moderate rate, data transport will dominate most networks by the years 2002-2005 requiring more bandwidth than was anticipated. The new applications that are emerging requiring transport over optical networks are: LAN/WAN Service (10Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s & 1Gbit/s); High speed Internet; IP VPN; Video distribution. More applications will emerge in the near future. It is likely that they will have similar data oriented characteristics to those mentioned above. This article describes the activities in the standard bodies to adapt to this anticipated growth.