After he finished his plenary session on Tuesday morning, the next item on Philippe Morin's agenda was as a panel member for a media/analyst luncheon at OFC/NFOEC.

Daryl Inniss of Ovum was the panel moderator. The four panel members included Philippe; Matthew Ma, the VP of transport and network engineering at Tata Communications; Mike Nishiguchi, the general manager of transmission devices R&D labs at Sumitomo; and Andrew Odlyzko, the professor of the School of Mathematics and Digial Technology Center at the University of Minnesota.

So the panel had a nice mix with an industry analyst, a service provider, and equipment vendor, a components provider, and an academic.

I took some notes of what I found interesting from the luncheon and have them bulleted out below. If you'd like more of a line-by-line flow of the conversation, TMWorld.com has a really nice article here that gives a bit of a script of the conversation at the luncheon.

Stats and figures

• Daryl Innis said that there has been ~50% growth year-over-year (YoY) for Internet traffic since 2001.

• At the same time, he said that during that time worldwide wireline carrier revenues were "at best" growing in the single digits.

• He also said that the cost for equipment has been declining 20-25% YoY

• Mike Nishigushi said that on the components side the industry has been seeing a 20% component cost reduction per year. He also commented that he didn't think that was sustainable.

• Andrew Odlyzko had some stats on Internet traffic growth rates specifically in Canada: 55% in 2006, 44% in 2007, and 32% in 2008. In general, Andrew was the contrary view on the panel, as he suggested several times that overall growth had been slowing for quite some time.

Quotes and themes

• The overall theme of the conversation revolved around the drivers for bandwidth demand/growth and how the industry can accomodate this deman in a cost-effective way.

• Another common theme expressed by Matthew Ma and others was that there is no next "killer app" for bandwidth growth...it is more of a combination of various factors and applications driving the continued growth.

• Philippe Morin: "Simplification of the network is going to happen."

• Philippe Morin: "One challenge is, how do we lower the cost for the access portion of the network?"

• Philippe Morin: "Power (consumption) is one of the biggest challenges in our industry. We don't spend enough time talking about it."

See below for a picture of the panel participants. From left to right: Matthew Ma, Philippe Morin, Daryl Inniss, Mike Nishigushi, and Andrew Odlyzko.