Photonics: Shining a spotlight on new markets
By KRYSTLE CHOW
Published in the Ottawa Business Journal newspaper and website.
June 11, 2007
Click here to view this article on OttawaBusinessJournal.com.
Photo by DARREN BROWN for the Ottawa Business Journal
Fibre-optics technology isn’t just for the telecom industry anymore, and Ottawa’s photonics companies are capitalizing on that fact with innovative new products for telecom and beyond.
Six-year-old BTI Photonics is one such company. It caters to the boom of high-bandwidth sites like video uploading phenomenon YouTube with its system-level photonics product that dramatically increases the capacity of networks “at the edge.” These networks are used by small business parks and suburbs, and are smaller than the core infrastructures for central offices provided by companies such as Nortel and Cisco.
“With the onslaught of video-streaming on the Internet, sites like Joost and Google are increasing their requirements for video capacity and there are huge demands on bandwidth and service providers’ infrastructure,” says BTI’s chief executive officer Lance Laking. “It’s a challenge for cable and telephone companies to deliver this bandwidth competitively.”
Mr. Laking says the video-streaming trend has changed all requirements for infrastructure, with what is currently available for networks at the edge unable to accommodate the huge bandwidth needed.
However, BTI’s product is able to fit on top of existing systems to increase capacity, thereby saving the huge cost of (more…)
