The Lightwave Blog

• What's the killer app? Keynoter Surya Panditi, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Access and Transport Technology Group, touted video. However, Steve Carlton, VP of planning and product management at Fujitsu Network Communications, suggested that applications such as medical imaging, which require terabits of capacity at a time, will have an even greater impact. But closer to home, Joseph Huggins, director, access and transport technology management at Qwest, said not to forget about online gaming.
  
• Kou Miyake, director, NTT Service Integration Laboratories, revealed that it will take 20 million subscribers for NTT to make money with its FTTH services. The company hopes to reach that figure by the end of fiscal 2010.
  
• Vik Saxena, senior director, network architecture, office of the CTO at Comcast Cable, said his company would deploy 100GbE technology today if it were available, driven more by operational efficiencies than pure bandwidth demand. However, Verizon's Elby said he expects that it will take two or three generations of 100G technology development before the technology meets the necessary price points for wide acceptance.
  
• Despite a darker economic environment than at this time in 2008, the Component Vendors panelists weren't nearly as cranky as they were last year. A wag in the audience suggested that's because they were in shock. However, I think that last year, component execs felt that they hadn't derived the rewards they thought were due them from a rebounded market. In the current environment, depressed margins and company valuations make more sense.
  
• Along these lines, Source Photonics chief Near Margalit suggested that a significant percentage of optical components vendors should get used to the idea that their margins will never exceed 25%.
  
• The panelists on our M&A; panel don't expect a big play along the lines of the Finisar/Optium merger this year. With credit tight, cash will be precious -- and won't be spent without an extremely good reason. That said, private companies' expected valuations appear to be going down to increasingly tempting levels. But no one is interested in buying market share. Acquisitions must increase product breadth or meet some other strategic objective.
  

Labels: 100G, mergers and acquisitions, OFC