Broadband communications and networks

Broadband communication environment is rapidly expanding in every country along with Internet application developments. The status of broadband service penetration and the R&D on access and backbone networfs are presented. The massive deployment of FITH (100Mbps) started a couple of years ago, and its subscribers is presently around 1.5 million in Japan. Internet traffic is growing almost 100% every year. This fact means 1,000 times growth in next 10 years. Then the backbone networks with photonic technologies is one of the most important research topics from this view point.