WDM may transform the Internet: Futurists speculate at NGN conference

Wave division multiplexing could change the way the core of the Internet is structured, said Internet pioneer John McQuillan in his opening remarks at the Next Generation Networks conference in Washington last week.

"When you have enough wavelengths, you can do some interesting things," said McQuillan, president of venture capital firm McQuillan Ventures. "The role of routers and optical switches might flip."

When wavelengths become abundant, they could dynamically connect locations on the Internet, replacing the static circuits that make up the Internet today and minimizing router hops, McQuillan said. "This is the first time I've seen anything that might scare Cisco," he said.

Such "virtual trunking," as McQuillan call is, is best as a controlled loop response to changes in bandwidth demand, said Gordon Saussy, vice president of marketing for IP infrastructure at Ericsson. "It will never have the granularity of Internet traffic," said Saussy.

The virtual trunking model also would require routing tables for edge devices to grow, said Olov Schagerlund, president and CEO of Dynarc, which debuted a multiservice switch/router for optical IP networks at NGN. It may be best to move anything that slows traffic to the network edge, he added.

Intelligence will move toward the network edge, said Dominick DeAngelo, senior vice president of marketing data products and services for IXC Communications. IXC has attempted to minimize router hops on its IP backbone, but it uses a hierarchical structure that delivers all traffic within a region to one router that is fully meshed with a master router for every other region.

McQuillan also predicts that computers will not be the primary way to access the Internet; IP will run directly over WDM, but intervening layers still will coexist; and manufacturers will develop methods of multiplexing multiple traffic streams onto individual fibers. Such methods could include coherence division, code division and frequency division multiplexing, he said.

When asked which industry segments are making money on the Internet, McQuillan said, "I'm old-fashioned. I like products that if you dropped them on your feet, you'd hurt yourself - and those products are making money."