Infinera CTO: Video Swamping Net, Optical Can Help

Over at Structure 08, the GigaOM conference about cloud computing (where Chris and I are, respectively, live-streaming and live-blogging all day), Drew Perkins, the CTO of optical transport equipment maker Infinera, tells us his company is having to rapidly scale its technology as the Internet grows.

What’s driving the growth? Video. “Video traffic is clearly the biggest consumer on the Internet,” and the addition of video traffic swamps all other traffic. “Video will completely swamp the network,” and there will be exponentially increasing bandwidth demand as video applications grow.

Conventional technology won’t be able to handle the demand, said Perkins, so Infinera is looking to use photon-integrated circuitry to help solve this problem.

Here’s a follow-up interview Om conducted with Perkins in the hallway: