Chart Watch: LightCounting
Summing transceiver shipments in the core of the network and plotting the data against traffic growth provides useful insights into the state of the network.
"We use transceiver shipment data [from vendors] to calculate how fast the network is growing and compare it to the traffic growth," says Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of market research firm, LightCounting.
What it reveals is that in 2005-06 there was a significant discrepancy between traffic growth and installed capacity: there was 35-40% traffic growth while investment in dense wavelength division multiplex (DWDM) only grew 20-25%. This gap began to shrink in 2007-08.
LightCounting stresses that network investment must keep track with the traffic growth. "It is not going to be a one-to-one correlation as network efficiency improves over time," says Kozlov. But the gap in the past was too large and probably had to do with unused network capacity.
"As long as the network expansion is to continue just to keep up with traffic, we are looking at sustainable growth," says Kozlov.
Good long-term news for the optical component and module makers.