First page Back Continue Last page Overview Graphics
1990s: High Capacity Backbones
Backbone capacities increased from 2.5 Gb/s to 100s of Gb/s during the 1990’s
- Wavelength division multiplexing with 160 waves of 10 Gb/s was commercially available
Several high-capacity backbones built in the US and Europe
- Williams, Enron, Global Crossing, 360 Networks
But not enough traffic to fill the backbones
- Customers (businesses and homes) not served by high-capacity networks in the “access” network
- “First-mile” is the bottleneck