Originally posted on Gigaom:
Much like the debate over whether raising the US federal debt ceiling is the right choice for the country, the networking industry all too regularly engages in a debate about whether the need for faster data connections is real. The significant role of broadband as an economic driver deserves to be elevated to a similar level of attention as progress and innovation are stifled when network capacity is constrained, which doesn’t bode well for consumers, businesses, research communities and the economy on the whole.
High-speed, high-capacity networks are critical to our future because they power the world’s Internet and digital economy. For the most part, networks based on 100G technology have become mainstream to address current demands – and this represents a giant leap forward from traditional network architectures and scale. However, it won’t be long before we need to go beyond 100G and even 400G and start to build 1 Terabit networks.
