Telecosm

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Posting ini lagi-lagi merefer dari artikel di Internet. Kali ini diambil dari satu artikel di situs Technology Review yang mengulas sedikit tentang Telecosm, istilah yang di”karang” oleh George Gilder. Artikel yang ditulis oleh Mark Williams ini khusus meliput state / status / tingkatan / level dari kondisi Telecosm di tahun ini.

Tulisan lengkapnya bisa diacu langsung ke artikel aslinya, syukur-syukur kalau mau browsing tentang terminologi telecosm dari pak Gilder. Ada satu artikel di Kompas minggu lalu yang saya lihat cukup mirip dengan artikel ini yang ditulis oleh Ninok Leksono, hanya beliau lebih fokus pada Internet Crash.

The State of the Global Telecosm
By Mark Williams

This past February, 12,000 members of what is perhaps the most important technology industry converged on San Diego's for their annual conference. Since 2005 this event has been called the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference.

Nearly one terameter (1,000 million kilometers) of fiber-optic cable encircling the earth effectively makes up our global civilization's central nervous system, since it carries Internet traffic and all international telecommunications. The world's data traffic, moreover, is doubling in volume every two years and People have been predicting that the Internet would crash.

What's a telecosm?. In 2000--the year communications carriers and technology suppliers saw their stock begin to collapse-- George Gilder had published a book called Telecosm (whose original subtitle was How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World). In those days, any company endorsed by Gilder's monthly newsletter--which by the late 1990s mainly endorsed companies involved in the global build-out of optical networks--immediately experienced the "Gilder effect": its stock value surged.

In 1989 Gilder established himself as a technology pundit: after published Microcosm, which assessed the microchip revolution. In 1990 he published Life after Television, which predicted that "teleputers" connected by fiber-optic cable would make broadcast television obsolete.

Gilder argued that just as the microprocessor had introduced previously unimaginable processing power, so the fiber-optic construction boom would usher in a world of instantaneous communication and infinite bandwidth: the telecosm. He predicted that it would make "the CPU ... peripheral, the network central," and that it would enable anyone to launch a product, company, or political movement. But every boom must go bust, and the crash of the telecommunications industry, when it came, proved worse than the bursting of the dot-com bubble. More than $500 billion was lost in just a few years. Between 2001 and 2004, 216 telecommunications companies went bankrupt--most notably Worldcom ($104 billion in assets), whose CEO, Bernie Ebbers, received a 25-year jail sentence for what remains the largest accounting fraud in U.S. history. Meanwhile, hitherto stable industry giants like AT&T staggered.

Ethernet coinventor Bob Metcalfe had told his audience that 1,000-gigabyte-per-second Ethernet (terabit Ethernet) would emerge around 2015. He pointed to video, new mobile, and embedded systems as the factors driving this rising data flood: "Video is becoming the Internet's dominant traffic, and that's before high definition comes fully online. Mobile Internet just passed a billion new cell phones per year. Then totally new sources of traffic exist, like the 10 billion embedded microcontrollers now shipped annually."

Did Metcalfe believe that the existing infrastructure-- built in the boom years, when great excesses of fiber-optic cable were laid down--could support terabit Ethernet? "That dark fiber laid down then is being lit up, and some routes are now full," he said. "That's the principal pressure to go to 40 and 100 gigabits per second. It seems we can reach those speeds with basically the same fibers, lasers, photodetectors, and 1,500-nanometer wavelengths we have, mostly by means of modulation improvement. But it's doubtful we'll wring another factor of 10 beyond that." Thus, the backbone networks would need to be overhauled and new technologies implemented.

Likewise, on the trade-show floor, a global network with infinite bandwidth and
instantaneous transmission--were becoming available in 2008. Companies exhibited products that made use of silicon photonics: Lightwire, for instance, offered a lightweight transceiver designed to greatly improve upon the SFP+ modules currently used to connect servers and network equipment. Since photons move much faster and scatter much less heat than electrons, it promises to reduce power dissipation by more than half.

However, the economy was sinking and the industry needed to undergo consolidation. And who would pay the up-front costs for these next-generation networks?
Jag Bolaria, a Linley Group analyst : "In Europe and even parts of Asia, they're getting significantly more--maybe 10 megs. But in America, carriers own the pipes, and we don't really see much competition. If they don't want to give you much bandwidth--and AT&T and other carriers are selling T1 lines and charging seriously for them--you don't get much bandwidth.

Bolaria was guardedly optimistic about the future. "We're slowly moving toward more than 25 megs of bandwidth in a fiber-optic pipe into the house," he said. "I think as you start getting two- to five-meg uplinks, then you'll reach the point where users can put their own content in high definition." That, he speculated, might change Hollywood as radically as the Internet had already changed newspapers. "Overall," he said, "I'm
looking forward to the time when you can truly choose or create your own content, as opposed to 'This is what you get and how much you pay for it."