February 2008 Archives
February 29, 2008
Google world domination
At the OFC/NFOEC exhibition last week, Google was recruiting for engineers - yet more evidence that the search engine company believes in controlling its own infrastructure.
Some of the jobs being advertised include project manager for network acquisition, network engineer, deployment, and optoelectronics engineers. According to its website, the company's platforms team "designs and builds the software, hardware, computing platform and network technologies that power all of Google's services".
Google's presence at the show coinsided with the general release of its plans for the Unity submarine cable, which will give a consortium of owners, including Google, access to 7.68 Tbit/s of capacity across the Pacific. Here's Google's own take on why the company is building an undersea cable system. In a nutshell, existing cable systems aren't able to supply enough bandwidth, apparently.
Similarly, at the end of last year it emerged that Google has built its own Ethernet switches, because commercially-available options didn't meet the company's requirements. Interesting. All this has left some people asking if Google could be the source of the innovation that gets the industry out of the capacity "dead end" it is facing after 100 Gbit/s.
February 26, 2008
Welcome to my blog
There is a time in every blog's life when it has just one entry. So let's get it over with.
A good place to start is to say "welcome". Here you can expect to find news nuggets, signposts to items of interest to the optical networking community that are published elsewhere on the web, and snippets that simply make me smile.
There's a wealth of knowledge and opinion out there among our readers, and I encourage you to add your views by using the commenting tools at the end of each post. If you would prefer to contact me directly with confidential questions or feedback, please email me at pauline.rigby@iop.org.