If you measure time against technological progress, six years is a long time in optical networking. In 2012, we were congratulating ourselves for getting to 100G transport. Now we’ve officially reached 600G, as Fujitsu recently demonstrated on our new 1FINITY T600 blade, the latest in the 1FINITY transport series. Optical transport products are now available that can modulate photons to create signals with 600,000,000,000 bits of information packed into every second, and send those signals at close to the speed of light, traversing the globe almost instantaneously. To put this colossal capability into perspective, a 2 TB digital library could be transmitted virtually anywhere on the globe in seven seconds with a single T600.
It’s easy to disregard or minimize yet another technology advancement. But the implications of 600G and beyond are more significant and positive than simply an increased amount of Internet junk. For example, healthcare could become extremely collaborative across continents with a combination of real time data collection and data analytics with massive data rate transfers near real time. Universally available high-speed connections to a smartphone supports the kind of data gathering and analysis needed to understand our world better and develop remedies for the many serious problems we face.
Access to information is the chief means of empowerment in both personal and business life. Consequently, it is important deploy this 600G technology rather than, for example, hold to the false economy of continued deployments at slower rates. Being able to transmit entire libraries in seconds is an awesome power that opens up rich possibilities. The network occupies a critical role as the foundation of the connected digital economy that, one way or another, is making stakeholders out of every one of us. So, one might say our industry has an economic and moral imperative to drive the highest possible speeds and capacities as deep into communities as possible. High-speed connectivity fosters opportunity, learning and commerce. In the final analysis, more really IS better when it comes to the network.