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How quickly can the IP traffic grow?

Moore's Law stipulates a 100% increase every 18 months. In fact, routers' centralized processing capacity is increasing by 1.2 times in every 18 months, while user bandwidth requirements double every 12 months - far quicker than the growth of the router capability. Previously, we depended upon technological answers, which we believed would guide network development. Now it seems that the real driver of network development is the new user requirements that broadband experience constantly generates. Such requirements stimulate a continuing increase in bandwidth that forces carriers to expand their networks, based on what can aptly be described as an explosive growth in IP traffic.

At a time when bandwidth seems to be overflowing, it is a generally understood bandwidth costs are cheap. However, we can inversely calculate bandwidth value from the costs of bandwidth losses. An investigation into submarine fiber optic cable breaks in Asia early this year indicates that a single carrier lost over RMB100 million. 27% of the subscribers supported by the largest wired broadband carrier in South Korea were affected, and Southeast Asian fixed network services supplied by Singaporean and Japanese carriers were interrupted. The affected services had to be transferred via the United States and Europe. Other statistics demonstrate that a network failure in North America caused a direct loss of USD 10 million for an airline company, and almost pushed several banks to bankruptcy.

While we might compare the flow broadband to water, bandwidth growth and the costs incurred by losses are generally overlooked, although this can directly influence the network expansibility and reliability that form two major concerns for carriers involved in network operations.

All-IP has become a universally accepted direction in the industry. The future All-IP network will inherit the hierarchical architecture of existing telecom networks, while network expansibility and reliability will depend on optical transmission networks, which will evolve into large capacity, highly reliable and expandable networks that offer sufficient protection, manageability, compatibility, and openness.

To offer professional basic network guarantees for service and network transformation, new technologies have been constantly developed in the optical transmission field. The optical transport network (OTN) technology can offer cost-effective, reliable and expandable large granule transmission services, including broadband and IPTV, that respond to the new-era development of diversified and broadband IP services. In order to meet mobile base station and dedicated line packet bearer requirements, multi-service transport platform (MSTP) technology will further evolve into packet transport network (PTN) technology. The control plane of automatic switched optical network (ASON) can improve basic network flexibility, service robustness and maintenance.

It can be concluded that the key for carrier-led network transformation describes the construction of resilient transmission networks that integrates OTN, MSTP, PTN and ASON technologies. Thus, we enter the high-speed broadband era.