AT&T CTO: Throw Moore’s Law out, rethink networks

Telecom carriers must fundamentally rethink how networks are designed to keep up with runaway bandwidth demand, AT&T’s chief technology officer said Wednesday during a panel discussion on the first morning of the Supercomm trade show.

Though AT&T’s work in upgrading its backbone network in 2008 were “unprecedented,” future increases in demand will eventually outpace carriers’ ability to keep up, said John Donavan, AT&T’s CTO.

“The capacity we carried in 2008 will be a rounding error five years out,” he said. “Our 2-[gigabit-per-second] backbone lasted seven years. Our 10-gig lasted five. Our 40-gig will last three. You get to 100 gig, what’s that – 18 months? At 400 gig, I think routers melt. The finance [department] likes liquid assets, but I don’t think that’s what they have in mind.”

“We need to fundamentally rethink how were carrying traffic in our networks, how we’re pre-positioning content,” he added. “I don’t think you can stop at the equipment and the treadmill and just the cost per bit. We have to back out of that and fundamentally rethink how we interoperate, how networks are constructed, how routing is done. How we move content in off hours. We’ll end up in a dire situation a few years out if we don’t collectively step up as an industry and throw Moore’s Law out the window. Because that stuff really helps in the backbone but it doesn’t help when you have the kind of capacity we’re going to have at the edge and in the [radio access network] on the mobility side.”

Verizon CTO Mark Wegleitner said his company is rethinking how it will boost capacity to wireless base stations to accommodate a “flood” of data from 4G networks coming soon. “We’re able to at least envision the idea of routing base station to base station instead of bringing everything back in to the backbone and then back out to a base station again,” he said.

Qwest Communications CTO Pieter Poll echoed that theme on the panel, reporting 45% compound annual growth in subscriber data consumption. “The industry has to make sure we track cost per bit at the same rate,” Poll said. “Subscribers are not expecting that as their consumption goes up, their base broadband bill will go up. But it’s an industry imperative that we focus on that.”

Poll credited IP technologies with having compressed network cost structures but cautioned that optical technologies haven’t followed the same curve.

Some of the panelists agreed that cloud computing technologies may help these issues by virtualizing network infrastructure and making it more flexible.