Ever since the emergence of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in the early 2000s, the world has looked towards Asia for leadership. To be perfectly fair, it hasn’t exactly found the encouragement it was looking for and ultimately the early Asian examples haven’t inspired copycat deployment elsewhere. But there is a new wave of Asian fibre deployments – both in developed and in emerging markets – that may well inspire other nations as we move forward.

No self-respecting optical equipment vendor can afford to be without a well-considered strategy for software defined networking (SDN). Over the last 18 months or so, most of the major and second-tier vendors have announced how they intend to approach software control of the optical layer in carrier transport networks – which we will call transport SDN to distinguish it from the more well-developed application of SDN in data centre network environments.

It’s getting ever harder to remember what the world was like before Google and Facebook. Not only do what many people think of as simply websites play big roles in our daily lives, they also shape the physical structure of the Internet itself. And in doing so, they present both opportunities and threats to the rest of the networking industry.

Cable operators are used to having the upper hand when it comes to delivering entertainment services to consumers. But as demand for high-speed broadband surges and telecom operators expand into Internet protocol television (IPTV), cable operators must invest in their networks or face losing subscribers to other service providers.