Optical Networking Best Practices Handbook

9.2. DENSE WAVELENGTH DIVISION MULTIPLEXED BACKBONE DEPLOYMENT

The infamous exponential Internet protocol (IP) traffic curve pushed many carriers toward massive fiber builds and considerable DWDM backbone deployment. However, the telecom industry crisis and inevitable consolidation definitely changed the environment associated with integrated backbone and metro pan-European network providers. For carriers who are still in business and emerging from debt, the primary concern is delaying further investments, "sweating" existing assets, and concentrating on short-term profitable business models, while facing cutthroat competition from reborn carriers with clean balance sheets and no clients, and offering unrealistic prices in second-hand networks [2].

Despite the industry crisis, traffic kept growing at a very fast pace, although much lower than the "doubling-every-5-months" growth factor of the end of the 1990s. At the same time, according to industry analysts, less than 11% of the current fiber infrastructure is actually carrying traffic using terabit systems, and only at a fraction of their capacity. With that kind of fiber inventory, carriers will be hard pressed to recover their investment and may further erode any value through sales-driven price erosion. Such overprovisioned backbones lead to maximizing the use of adopted network solutions and delaying investments in new technologies. Nevertheless, significant studies have been progressing, focusing on enhanced metro and access ...