8. Optical switching
Let's start with a pretty safe prediction: The Internet isn't going to get any smaller or less popular in 2001. Staying on a roll here, let's add this one: Keeping Internet data moving fast and reliably to and from business partners and customers will be a key IT objective.
One of the more promising technologies to make sure that Internet and WAN links continue to scale with demand is all-optical (photonic) switching, where only at the end points of a communication link is the communication signal electrical.
End-to-end optical links are still some years off because of the low cost of copper wiring and network cards vs. fibre wiring and fibre-capable cards, but on backbones, all-optical switches and the amazing micromirror arrays that power them have already become a reality in products such as Lucent Technologies's WaveStar Lambda Router.
There are still many significant problems with all-optical switching, however. Higher-level network layer switching, which requires decoding inner layers of packet data to get routing information, remains tricky, as does the need to regenerate signals as they degrade, which requires a conversion to electrical signals and then an optical retransmission.
Still, there has been significant progress in this area, and the frequency density of fibre transmission techniques keeps rising, offering more flexibility and ever-greater throughput on optical links.
Moving from macroscopic to microscopic technology, optical transistors (which are a key step to fully optical microprocessors) are also getting closer to reality. However, we are still years away from high-volume, high-yield manufacturing processes for these components. Early research holds the promise of a hundredfold speedup over current electrical transistors, so the potential of all-optical computing remains tantalising.
