Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
internethistory.org
Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#2FYI, this article is from 2016 and discusses the dot com bubble that popped around 2001.
Jeff Hecht is an excellent author.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#3Instant analogy to GPUs...
A similar story is found in the railway bubble bursts in the US. Railways are also incredibly revolutionary technologies that reshaped societies, doesn't mean they are immune from investment cycles.
That being said, given ChatGPT was only released 8 months ago, we are probably very early in the GPU boom, far from bubble yet.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#4Yeah the phone companies laid those thick 144-strand bundles before wave division multiplexing. They figured the only way to get more bandwidth was more fibers, right?
WDM came along and caught them with their pants down; now all of a sudden you could just attach different devices to the ends of the fiber and get 16x the bandwidth. No backhoes needed. Then CWDM let you split and combine channels in locations without a reliable power supply -- no electronics, just prisms!
Unfortunately their response -- those who weren't killed off -- was to get the antitrust regulators to look the other way (i'm sure the "national security" card was played) while they bought each other up and carved countries into a checkerboard of regional monopolies.
But hey, if you squint at it from far enough away you can see two colors, so that's not a monopoly, right?
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#5>The investors who threw money at optics at the peak of the bubble probably would bankrupt us all if we ever hit a true “technological singularity.”
If we really hit technological singularity, that will be the hail Mary of all bubbles.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#6Yeah the phone companies laid those thick 144-strand bundles before wave division multiplexing. They figured the only way to get more bandwidth was more fibers, right? WDM came along and caught them with their pants down; now all of a sudden you could just attach different devices to the ends of the fiber and get 16x the bandwidth. No backhoes needed. Then CWDM let you split and combine channels in locations without…
In the meantime though we've started using a substantial fraction of those thick fiber bundles and dark fiber is getting harder and harder to find. Barring another revolution in technology I suspect that at some point we'll be laying even more of those big bundles, or even bigger ones.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#7Yeah the phone companies laid those thick 144-strand bundles before wave division multiplexing. They figured the only way to get more bandwidth was more fibers, right? WDM came along and caught them with their pants down; now all of a sudden you could just attach different devices to the ends of the fiber and get 16x the bandwidth. No backhoes needed. Then CWDM let you split and combine channels in locations without…
WDM guy here. Sure, 80 channels are space for lots of 400 Gb/s circuits... But we still fill cables and keep laying more. Though yes, the big 1288 fibers cables aren't common. Also, lambdas don't terminate at every node - so sparse network topology implies that filling all channels on a single link is a merely theoretical situation.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#8>The investors who threw money at optics at the peak of the bubble probably would bankrupt us all if we ever hit a true “technological singularity.” If we really hit technological singularity, that will be the hail Mary of all bubbles.
conversely, I think we have been in the singularity since the late 1700's. For many thousands of years human manufacturing capability was effectively flat, a few blips and bumps but the advancement was generally steady and linear.
And then in the late 1700's things changed. The graph went hockey stick and has stayed exponential since. However from inside this bubble there is a sort of tech dilatation where everything appears normal and flat and it is only the future that has exponential growth.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#9I don't get the drama. To me this looks like a normal process in an industry that discovered a groundbreaking technology. A new technology pops up, everybody rushes to innovate, lots of actors do nonsense, some do the right thing, but for many of them you don't know beforehand which is which. So you throw money at all of them. The rush creates some really good ideas and innovations. And a lot of BS and wrong decisions. Within a few years, the successes emerge, everybody else is flushed out of the market.
Today fiber is the network tech. Except for the last mile, everything is fiber. We're at 400G per port, soon 800G, and the market keeps growing and 1.6T is the obvious next step. Normal growth process.
So, I don't really see the takeaway here. What to learn from it? Not to invest in hypes? That's not really how we grow.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#10>The investors who threw money at optics at the peak of the bubble probably would bankrupt us all if we ever hit a true “technological singularity.” If we really hit technological singularity, that will be the hail Mary of all bubbles.
conversely, I think we have been in the singularity since the late 1700's. For many thousands of years human manufacturing capability was effectively flat, a few blips and bumps but the advancement was generally steady and linear. And then in the late 1700's things changed. The graph went hockey stick and has stayed exponential since. However from inside this bubble there is a sort of tech dilatation where everything…
Flat? I don't think so. I'm at a coffee shop and looking around me, this is very different from just 20 years ago. People with laptops and smaetphones around me. Just 20 years ago, that same place saw a few CS major nerds with their laptops, everybody else sat with a book or some paper to write on or reading a paper newspaper. Still with a latte, but tech has changed everybody's life dramatically in 20 years. 20 years from now I'm again expecting at least as big a change.
Definitely exponential.