Simon Zelingher, VP of AT&T Research Labs, says his company will need to upgrade to a 100-Gbit/s backbone by the end of the decade in order to keep up with bandwidth demand driven by video and multimedia applications. As we recently noted, AT&T quadrupled capacity by moving to one global OC-768 (40 Gbit/s) core, but that bandwidth is being eaten up more quickly than the telco expected. To show how fast the new core, deployed only in the last year, is filling up, Zelingher noted that a 40-Gbit/s DWDM system in one point of presence, capable of carrying 80 wavelengths at full capacity, is already 25 percent full. "Currently we are looking at traffic growth that's explosive," says Zelingher. "The past traffic growth was steady and predictable. Now, not only is traffic explosive, it's unpredictable. All of a sudden, people had a new set of needs. We need to get accustomed to that situation."

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