Optical communications as a social infrastructure and its enabling technologies

The optical fiber communications community experienced 30 years of rapid growth from 1970 to 2000, and a severe downturn lasting several years after 2000, but has been rising up again in recent years. During this time, optical communications technology has established itself as the underlying basis of a new social infrastructure, supporting, for example, key industrial, financial, educational and medical activities. The recent globalization of the world would not have been feasible without our optical technology breakthroughs. In recent years optical communications have allowed the feasibility of IPTV applications, including broadcast TV, on-demand, and interactive streaming services, which have increased traffic by orders of magnitude, but not perhaps with a parallel established business model. This exploding traffic growth rate is exceeding that of Moorepsilas Law, which has meant the power consumption of our technology area is also forming an ever larger proportion of overall CO2 emissions, following that of the car industry. Our quest in the coming 10 years of further technical progress must be to find solutions, like the EDFA or ROADM in the past, which increase the flexibility and efficiency of photonic networks, as well as develop business model solutions underpinning the optical technology area, so as to continue supporting the social infrastructure of our society.