Made possible by another 30-year milestone—the birthday of Ciena Corporation

NEW YORK, Nov. 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — As of today, the number of registered websites on the World Wide Web has reached 2 billion, according to algorithms from Worldometer, voted one of the best reference sources by the American Library Association. This milestone was made possible by numerous Internet innovations, none more important than the optical amplifier technology from Ciena, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year as well. The optical amplifier freed up the massive capacity of fiber optics and ushered in The Information Age.

The optical amplifier was invented by Columbia University student Gordon Gould. His company Optelecom Inc. Along with his optical engineer  David Huber and Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co. They started Ciena to lead the global rollout of optical amplifiers using dense wave division multiplexing (WDM).

“The economics were overwhelming,” said Huber. “But if you ask the average person on the street, nobody knows that they are walking over buried cables full of optical amplifiers.”

Mutually reinforcing each other, the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web was fueled by the global deployment of optical amplifiers. Websites gave us the information; optical amplifiers carried it at the speed of light.

“It only took 10,000 days to make 10,000 years of accumulated knowledge accessible over the internet,” said Kimberlin.

Ciena’s optical breakthroughs were hailed in the Optical Society of America (now Optica) Centennial series as the “dawn of the internet” because WDM enabled the paradigm shift in communications from copper to fiber optic networking. “We amplified the optical amplifier,” Kimberlin noted during a Keynote at the 50th anniversary of the Internet titled The Primacy of Optical Amplifiers.

Although Web traffic dominated the Internet for years, advances in fiber and optical amplification techniques ultimately enabled video to prevail, today video consumes 7.5X more bandwidth than the Web. Where Huber could present only two movies per fiber in 1992, the modern day Telstra fiber network of Australia today can carry, in a second, the data equivalent of 1.2 million video streams simultaneously (30.4 Tbps). That is twice the number of movies cataloged by the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Beyond video, an Internet propelled by optical amplifiers also delivers innovations never before possible, including autonomous vehicles, smart phones, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence.

In just three decades, bandwidth per fiber has increased one million-fold, allowing the number of websites to increase one billion-fold. The significance of these two milestones is impossible to overstate — they gave The Information Age to two-thirds of the human race.

Spencer Trask & Co. is an advanced technology development firm that starts, banks and builds new ventures from the idea stage to the world stage. The firm works with obsessive missionaries, entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists to make the world a better place.

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SOURCE Spencer Trask & Co.