The final quarter of the year found me back in Asia, this time visiting China and India. As always, there are several stories I’d be happy to share privately on my experience, including this time an aborted landing in Hong Kong and being trapped in a glass elevator with the hotel porter in Bangalore at 4am! The flavor for this blog post however is intended to appeal to a different palate.
There are many different things to see and experience in both India and China, but one of my personal favorites is food. Let me be more specific, spicy food! Now for a man from the land where good food is boiled, or fried or boiled then fried….you may question my taste…and you may be right, but at the risk of offending my beautiful French wife, who introduced me to the joy of food perfectly prepared and balanced with complementary accompaniments, in general not considered “spicy”…I LOVE spicy food!
It’s interesting that over 400 years ago, the East India Trading Company became one of the first organisations with a global reach. It’s value was the collection and distribution of materials and spices including perhaps the most common spice – salt. I find it tough to imagine a time when there was no access to the now ‘go to’ spices I find in my own fridge and spice rack….including, of course, something as commonplace as salt or pepper, where I’ve been fortunate enough to find a personal supply from both Malaysia and Vietnam, while within 40 miles of my current home!
As always, you’re wondering what on earth this has to do with fiber…or which of those spices is he smoking, but I’m getting there. This time around, just one year since I was last in India, I found hotel wireless connection multiple times faster than I’d experienced before, both in Indian hotels and Chinese airports. Now those networks existed before, but something has spiced them up. Fiber of course…but I’m guessing you knew that. With the increasing fiber content in PON, wireless, datacenter and even airplane networks, I can increasingly be as effective while on the road as in my own home or office.
With pluggable optics being sold into everything from fast Ethernet to 100G Ethernet, SONET/SDH OC-3 to OC-768 and Wireless 1G to 10G, I’m left wondering if the traders of the East India Company perhaps sometimes felt as we do – enabling a whole new experience for connected people all over the world with every kind of transceiver (or spice) the heart desires.
There are many kinds of networks in the world, just as with cuisine, but common to all is the need for some kind of flavor, additive, spice – for the high-speed network, fiber brings the most enhanced performance and it comes in many form factors. The Global Trading Company for these fiber-optic ‘spices’ – Finisar.
As we come to the end of 2012, we wish all of our Lightspeed readers’ happy holidays and a wonderful New Year!