February 20, 2013
by Sean Buckley
What are the hottest technologies in the wireline segment of
the telecom indistry this year? Welcome to FierceTelecom's annual look at the
technology and trends that are reshaping telecommunications.
One thing that we noticed in compiling this list is that
many of these technologies or trends build on top of what came before. While
there may be one person, or a group of people, that are credited with the
development of a technology, many technologies end up taking on various forms
that were never initially envisioned.
Take the Metro Ethernet Forum's Carrier Ethernet 2.0
specification. A key piece of CE 2.0 specification is centered on developing an
interconnection process for eight standard service types when service providers
have to establish a connection with a carrier partner to fulfill a service
order.
Meantime, Ethernet has become an accepted wide area
technology used by service providers for backhauling traffic and as a service
that service providers offer to their large enterprise and SMB clients.
Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet at Xerox's PARC Research
Center in 1973 with partner David Boggs, said during the recent Metro Ethernet
Forum in San Diego that he never envisioned that the technology would be used
outside of the corporate LAN.
Then, there's VDSL2 and its new partners, Dynamic Spectrum
Management (DSM) and Vectoring. Pioneered by John Cioffi, who is credited as
the "father of DSL," these techniques help traditional telcos expand
the rate and reach of the bandwidth they can deliver over their copper plant.
If the telecom industry could have started its rollout of
the PSTN again today from scratch, it's likely they would have used fiber. The
reality is that traditional telcos built their last-mile networks with copper.
Despite aggressive moves by Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and its FiOS service, carriers
including AT&T (NYSE: T) and large incumbent European operators such as
Deutsche Telekom are in the process of trialing or using these technologies to
expand their respective customer bases and deliver higher speed broadband
services over their existing copper networks.
What CE 2.0 and emerging copper technologies illustrate is
that what today's hot technology is often the outgrowth of an idea or invention
from decades ago. None of the technologies that made our list would have been
possible without the initial foresight to lay the foundations that others built
upon.
Opinions over what technologies are truly "hot"
can vary, so I encourage you to weigh in with your thoughts and suggestions on
this year's list
Coherent optics and 100G
Carrier Ethernet 2.0
Ethernet over Copper
Fiber to the Tower
Optical Transport Network
Software Defined Network
SIP Trunking
VDSL2 with bonding or vectoring
Virtual Network Interface Device
XG-PON
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