Let there be light,” a voice said. And there was light. At least there was in part of the telecommunications network backbone-the many-headed beast that delivers our telephone, fax and Internet services. The problem is that fiber optics have thus far been installed in only part of the system. As soon as the light reaches the big network hubs where it is switched, the signal must be converted to electrons. Electronic switches are bulky, expensive and, by the standards of light-speed, slow. But until now, there haven’t been any optical switches small and fast enough to replace them. This bottleneck is going to become tighter and tighter as our appetite for big-bandwidth applications such as video-on-demand grows.
It’s obvious that whoever develops the first reliable all-optical switch is going to cash in. Which is why Lucent, Nortel, Agilent, Corning and a host of startups are hustling to make optical switches. The first commercial versions are reaching the market now-and the markets are taking notice. The day Agilent unveiled its prototype optical switch, the company’s stock rose by 47 percent.
TR readers should take note that this exuberance, unlike the dot-com mania, is not irrational. Indeed, the optical switches being developed for telecommunications are only the first step in the “Microphotonics Revolution,” as Peter Fairley reports. After breaking the bottleneck in the telecom backbone, the next step is likely to be extending optical switching to the routers that send our e-mail hither and yon. The result: an all-optical Internet significantly faster than the one we know.
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