Having been online now since the early 1980s and having watched/used the ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth we have available, it still made me pause to read that Verizon Business has launched 40Gbps connections on its backbone using Juniper Networks routers.
40 Gbps?
Pretty mind-blowing, considering where we have come from. I'll spare you all the tugging on my beard (that is now gray in spots) and reminiscing about how we all had to connect at 110 baud using acoustic couplers... I will say that back in the late 1990's when I wrote the Networking Essentials Exam Guide, I did cover the OC-n naming convention for connections, but I don't think we would ever have imagined that some day there would be "OC-768". Pretty cool!
Not that we as consumers will necessarily see that bandwidth anytime soon... but it is nice to know it is there in the backbone. (Also interesting that they note that the growth of their VoIP offerings is one of the reasons for being interested in this backbone.)
