WDM: North American deployment trends

For decades, TDM has been the fundamental basis for adding capacity to digital telecommunications networks. Suddenly emerging in the past two years WDM has emerged as an important and widely deployed complement to TDM. In fact, sales of systems based on the new technology have risen to over a billion dollars at breathtaking speed. In this article, the author addresses the factors that propelled WDM to the forefront of telecommunications technologies, and looks at the immediate future, with WDM pushing into new areas of telecommunications networks, and emerging as the basis of logical optical networking.