& QOS Remote Configuration & Monitoring Voice Over IP File Transfer, (FTP) TCP & UDP/IP HTML, HTTP FTP, HTTP, SMPT POTS/ISDN, Leased Lines Circuit, Cell & Packet Ethernet Switching Digital Circuit Switching SONET/SDH SONET/SDH Transmission Longevity 1994-2006 - 2003 - 2007 2004 - 2009 - FIGURE 14-1 after many times the investment in real products does a broadcaster or communications business start investing in those products to begin generating revenue and gross margin. So anyone telling you about technological surprise has been asleep or not paying attention. Once you understand this picture, it becomes a fairly simple exercise to monitor technical papers from the academic community to see where the manufacturers are likely to place their bets in the form of technology development and design, which leads to their press releases about their latest new gadget or discovery and how that might impact their future in our industry. An interesting example of where fiber development may be headed appeared in the New York Times on August 26, 2003 in an article: "New Telecommunication Tools May Emerge From the Deep." 14 PRACTICES, TOOLS, AND TECHNIQUES FOR LONG-TERM SURVIVAL "While in San Francisco for a scientific conference last year, Dr. Joanna Aizenberg, a research scientist at Bell Labs and senior author of the Nature paper, wandered through shops looking at shells and other collectibles from the sea. "In one shop she spotted a Venus' flower basket sponge, a creature with an intricate hollow latticework skeleton that lives thousands of feet deep in the western Pacific Ocean. What caught her eye was a ring of glassy filaments at the sponge's base that once tied it to the ocean floor. She bought the sponge. Back at the laboratory, Dr. Aizenberg and colleagues from Bell Labs, Tel Aviv University, and OFS, a Lucent spin-off, discovered that the filaments, about the length and thickness of hair, also carry light. While other researchers discovered a few years ago light-carrying fibers in a sponge off Antarctica, the fibers