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Few industries show as much promise for transforming the world. The optical industry holds the potential of giving everyone access to information everywhere, all the time. The race to light the world with optical technology should, in the end, help light human consciousness. |
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Special Features |
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Editor's Note: Bright promise
For every optical company that has stumbled, there are dozens more that are promising to make optical switches smarter, lasers easier to tune, chromatic dispersion more manageable, Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing ever more dense. |
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Photon profits
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Remember back when any optical player that had a new twist or small variation on a switch, router, chip or marketing scheme could get funded, go public and watch its stock soar? Not today
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| Pushing the limits
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| Now that 10-Gbps traffic is the ascendant norm, and 40 Gbps is next year's battleground, physicists are pushing the limits of just how fast information can travel across optical networks and still emerge intelligible on the other end. Optical network companies are teaming physicists with engineers to tap more bandwidth, sharpen fuzzy or dim signals and correct errors on the fly. | ||
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See the light bounce |
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| Replacing the current generation of switches with true optical ones not only eliminates the bottleneck caused by converting the signal, but creates a network that is more manageable, has much higher capacity, is faster to provision and is capable of supporting all kinds of new services, boosters say. It's not a question of whether to move in the direction of purely optical fabric, but how - and how quickly. | ||
| Test of time |
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Under pressure from carriers, manufacturers need to quickly move concepts from prototype to mass production. Carriers have their own set of pressures from customers eager to deploy complex enhanced services, with high reliability, at faster speeds, in smaller boxes.
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| Chips under glass |
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Using technology as old as World War II and as young as last week's breakthrough, chipmakers are transforming optical networks with devices that slice, dice and relight optical fibre and all its traffic.
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