By Loring Wirbel

When investors spoke of bandwidth in the booming days of Internet growth ten years ago, prior the crash of 2001, they invariably referred to packet aggregation in the backbone, in both wireline and wireless domains.  Dozens of startups were funded in every vertical sector of the backbone, such as optical and DSL and multi-GHz radio.

Due in part to the fiber overbuild that led to the crash, this focus on transport ended abruptly in the early days of the last decade.  Any 21^st-century reference to bandwidth is bound to be tied to the end-user device, particularly to small wireless platforms, overloaded with Wi-Fi and WiMAX and LTE connections.  Bandwidth also has consumer ties to such wired “digtal den” systems as digital TVs with HDMI and DisplayPort links.

As a result, the backbone is the victim of neglect at both the service provider and the enterprise.  The number of OEMs serving larger backbones has dwindled to an effective Big Three – Cisco Systems, Huawei, and L.M. Ericsson – with smaller players like Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper, and Ciena serving specialized sectors.  Even the major survivors give their backbone business the Rodney Dangerfield treatment.  Cisco, for example, pays far more attention to telepresence, its Flip camera subsidiary, and the home-network devices offered by Scientific-Atlanta and Linksys, than to its core switch and router businesses.

The result of such neglect shines through at inopportune times.  At the January Consumer Electronics Show, for example, all the wireless operators were on hand to insist that their networks would never suffer the bottlenecks AT&T experienced with the iPhone in late 2009.  But the plans for investing in LTE and WiMAX seemed spotty at best, and carriers just can’t get bargains in their capital investments with so few competitors left to play in the market.

Since the vast majority of backbones have consolidated on Ethernet at Layer 2 and TCP/IP at Layers 3 and 4, it’s not surprising that many developers consider backbone transport to be commoditized and boring.  But the more that we allow network transport to languish in neglect, the more we deny the most central portion of the communications market the innovation it deserves.