The optical fiber communication system has led to one of the greatest changes in human history. The ability to communicate seamlessly, universally, and economically on a global scale can change our society more than any other technological advancement. In the past few decades, we have moved from telephone to video, machine learning, telemedicine, and automation and control systems. All of this depends on the fiber optic communication system combined with the data center environment. What needs to be clear is that none of the technological alternatives we know today can replace the amazing data capacity and global coverage provided by optical fiber.

To consider where communication will take us, we need to consider the biggest challenges facing society. In the coming decades, society will undergo transformation of workplaces, transformation of classrooms, and redefinition of cities. The focus will be on eradicating multi-generational poverty, the conversion of energy and transportation systems, and the uniform availability of data for optimizing human efforts. In response to many of these challenges, communication technology has begun to reshape our financial system, our government, and our national boundaries, and access to information will continue to become more ubiquitous. In the next few decades, as high-performance communications become more important in our lives, fiber optic technology will follow this path. 

The scale of bandwidth growth and the continuous reduction of costs have led to the continuous development of data centers. These data centers are either optimized for low-latency applications or focused on high-power computing and efficient information caching. Although information will continue to be valued and shared, we will enter a new era in which data analysis and management will change our lives. The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence control systems will enhance the manual analysis of medical data, enabling people to understand local and global environmental issues and automate tasks to support a better understanding of our work.

Optical communication technology will continue to be based on the inherent synergy between optical fibers and semiconductors, because these elements work together to achieve truly large-scale, cost-effective bandwidth.

As a way to deal with this scale at the edge of the network, we will see the growth trend of optical aggregation instead of electrical aggregation, because only optical aggregation can continue to reduce the cost and power consumption per bit.

Driven by the shift to device-based building blocks, the existing trend of switching and routing virtualization will continue and achieve simplification of network architecture. Interface standards between functionally optimized components will continue to develop and achieve more open optical technology. These technologies will be deployed in an architecture with on-demand bandwidth and software reconfigurable, so that edge elements will rarely need to be upgraded. In a set of highly responsive protocols, provision will be shifted from centralized to locally enabled. These protocols help to quickly resupply bandwidth and byte-based economic consumption models. Bandwidth will become a practical tool, just like electricity today.

Technological innovation will focus on equipment and architectures that can reduce the overall power consumption of the network and simplify the connection from users to the delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant data/computing center in the network. Supply will require higher information security and integrity verification. Time will tell whether this can be achieved by integrating optics into electronic devices, or whether we will completely simplify electronic devices and rely on optical processing to simplify the network and reduce network power consumption.   

The past few decades have shown that the potential trend of increasing bandwidth is predictable, and the utility of this bandwidth to social needs has also increased. On top of this predictability, we have seen a series of unpredictable technological and architectural breakthroughs, which inevitably depend on the availability of cheap and sufficient bandwidth. Technology in the past has made incredible changes in the world, and I predict that in the next 50 years, data networks will continue to revolutionize the way society understands and solves problems.

— Dr. Dave Welch, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Infinera

Facts have proved that relying on yesterday's cost structure, routing chips, operating paradigms, tools, and 20 years of accumulated complexity, it is impossible to consistently meet the insatiable bandwidth demand, and the power consumption is sustainable.

It seems that we can continue to chart Neptune's Law for the time being, which will enable our current and future engineers to create the next generation of submarine cable innovations.

Obviously, bandwidth demand will continue to grow exponentially. Optical transmission capacity must be expanded to meet this demand, while the cost per bit must be reduced, and optical transmission equipment must become more space-saving and energy-saving.

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Optical communications in the next 50 years is likely to be committed to solving key fundamental challenges, making optical expansion more efficient and practical, and making these predictions more risky (and more interesting).

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