OFC/NFOEC: An Update on the State of Optical Networking

This IDC Flash looks at OFC/NFOEC, which was lightly attended this year, as was pretty much expected. The local restaurants said they were told to expect 12,000-15,000 attendees of the conference. The conference has neither confirmed nor denied these numbers. But regardless of how many people attended, our overall thoughts were positive for the optical industry. It was clear that interest in 100G is widespread; Verizon's ultra-long-haul (ULH) pre-RFI discussion was top of mind for all vendors, and AT&T's continued deployments of 40G for bandwidth relief are, well, continuing. It has some incredibly large routes at this time, so the road to 100G is of serious interest to AT&T as well.