The mess that is access

摘要

With baseball season under way, we've had a chance to view what USA Today recently confirmed as the single most difficult feat in sports: Hitting a fastball. Of course, it's particularly difficult right now because pitchers are generally ready ahead of the hitters, and cold weather works in their favor. The corollary in telecom is deploying new access technology. Over the past 10 years, there has been a steady stream of new, higher-speed, more efficient means of getting voice and data traffic into the network―most of which have died before or shortly after hitting the market. It's fair to say, in fact, that in no other area of network development has so much time, talent, effort and money come to naught. By contrast, look how quickly high-speed transmission technology hit the backbone network―dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) systems virtually leapt from the lab to the field by telecom standards.