Routed optical networks

Thu May 11 14:24:07 UTC 2023

On 5/11/23 09:33, Vasilenko Eduard via NANOG wrote:
>
> But it is speculation, not a trend yet.
>
> I remember 10y ago every presentation started from the claim that 100B 
> of IoT would drive XXX traffic. It did not happen.
>
> Now we see presentations that AI would be talking to AI that generates 
> YYYY traffic.
>
> Maybe some technology would push traffic next S-curve, maybe not. It 
> is still speculation.
>
> The traffic growth was stimulated (despite all VNIs) by 1) new 
> subscribers, 2) video quality for subscribers. Nothing else yet.
>
> It is almost finished for both trends. We are close to the plateau of 
> these S-curves.
>
> For some years (2013-2020) I was carefully looking at numbers for many 
> countries: it was always possible to split CAGR for these 2 
> components. The video part was extremely consistent between countries. 
> The subscriber part was 100% proportional to subscriber CAGR.
>
> Everything else up to now was “marketing” to say it mildly.
>
> Reminder: nothing in nature could grow indefinitely. The limit always 
> exists. It is only a question of when.
>
> PS: Of course, marketing people could draw you any traffic growth – it 
> depends just on the marketing budget.
>

I think the place where we are seeing continued growth is in the content 
provider private network, for that DC-to-DC traffic, even across continents.

For everything else, as you say, it's nice to predict. But what analysts 
and marketing departments say and what end users actually do are often 
vastly different.

As long as the majority of the Internet's traffic is "invisible", we 
can't really ever know. We can only tell by how much kit the DWDM 
vendors are selling to non-telco customers (content folk), as well as 
how many submarine cables are being built by non-telco consortia 
(content folk).

Mark.
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