Clarence Chandran, chief operating officer of Nortel Networks Corp., proclaimed Wednesday the dawn of the “photonic” decade, saying the connectivity demands of customers and corporate users as well as storage requirements will drive the need for eliminating bottlenecks on the Internet.
Chandran told a ComNet keynote audience, in Washington D.C., that photonic networks take dead aim at improving the user’s Web experience by helping reduce the high number of shopping sessions that are terminated before the completion of the transaction and by helping companies better respond to customer service demand.
The problem is slower bit-rate connections at the intersection of LAN and metropolitan networks, Chandran said. Companies have to prepare to solve this problem because “there will be terabits in the LAN” and storage area networks will be closer to the user as services such as Internet TV are deployed. “That is absolutely going to require a photonic structure,” he said.
Promoting photonics is consistent with recent Nortel acquisitions, including that of the optical component technology provider Photonic Technologies Ltd. in May. The US$35.5 million cash purchase of the Sydney, Australia-based company was designed to strengthen its presence in developing the all-optical Internet market. Photonic Technologies develops optical component technology for high- speed optical and DWDM (dense wave-division multiplexing) networks.
Nortel announced on Tuesday products and technology that are part of its new Personal Internet strategy for content delivery. The products are aimed at enabling personalized content-delivery based on the subscriber’s preferences from the subscriber’s location through the optical core to the content and back, Nortel said in its announcement.
The Personal Internet strategy is designed with content providers, wireless providers, hardware vendors and ASPs (application service providers) in mind so that the technology enables the success of a Web session, Chandran said. These include Intel Corp., AT&T Corp., infrastructure service company Loudcloud Inc., GTE Corp., Reuters and many others, most of which are relatively new customers of Nortel. Nortel’s products and services provide scalability and are aimed at making sure there isn’t a collision of technology and business, Chandran said.
The Personal Internet strategy is about addressing the needs of end users who want instantaneous access to relevant content and about the needs of service and content providers to target value-added content at specific audiences, Chandran said. The content boom is being accelerated by explosive growth in broadband adoption, coupled with insatiable demand for new content, business applications outsourcing, dramatic increases in the number of Web-enabled devices and Web destinations and globalization of the Internet, he said.
Nortel Networks, in Brampton, Ont., is at http://www.nortel.com/. In Sydney, Australia, Photonic Technologies can be reached at http://www.photonic.conm.au/.