N-GEN Communications Web-based Seminars ©NGCS

Seminar - An Overview of Communications Technologies

Module 5 - SONET, WDM, DWDM and B-ISDN Technologies                                                              Slide 71 of 76 _________________                                                                                  __________

                          Impact of WDM Technologies on the Carriers
                                     and Equipment Manufacturers

                                Overbuilt Carriers' Networks

                                Technology Capability Over Stripping the
                                   Traffic Demand

_________________                                                                                  __________

In anticipation of the traffic growth the carriers laid fiber in their plants. At the same time the WDM and the DWDM technologies boosted the capacity of the fiber-based infrastructure. The equipment manufacturers could not find new markets for their optical communications products and had to reduce their workforce in that field. Some of them had to get out of the optical communications businesses. Nortel and Lucent Technologies suffered heavy loses. Nortel had to reduce its' workforce from 90,000 to 30,000.

The communications industry is looking for bandwidth-gobbler applications to eat up the spare capacity.