Domain: ciena.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to ciena.com.
Comments · 5
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Difficult position to argue
If there's any pattern here, it's that companies will violate a competitor's patent by claiming the patent is invalid (ergo the violation is completely justifiable.) Here's a pretty classic example from the telecom bubble:
Dr. David Huber gets booted from Ciena corporation, and founds a competing entity - Corvis. Corvis builds a product that does exactly what Ciena's products do - they multiplex several optical signals onto a single fiber. Ciena has patents for synthesizing a higher-rate signal by bundling several lower-rate signals together. The process is called "inverse multiplexing," and has been around since the analog telephony days. You can inverse mux several analog telephone modems together, and some companies did. Ciena got patents by basically putting "on fiber optic cables" after the well known technique. Since Huber used to work at Ciena, he knew the technique had a long history, and consequently moved forward with the expectation that any patent infringement could be easily dismissed by claiming Ciena's patents were invalid by prior art.
So how did that work out? As you might expect, not so well for Corvis. -
Re:I disagree, slightly..
All this "use Dark Fiber stuff' is a load of crap. The reason the fiber is not used is because it is old technology. The newest Long Haul transmission equipment will not "play" on the most of the old dispersion shifted glass. Check these puppies out.
http://www.ciena.com/products/products_corestream_ product_overview.htm -
Not impressive for a fiber
It is only impressive if they are doing it by using a single wavelength on the fiber. Systems that could transmit over a terabit on a fiber have been around since the internet boom. See for example:
http://www.ciena.com/products/products_261.htm
Look under Scalable Capacity about two thirds down the page. They can to 1.9 Tb and have been in production for years. -
40Gbps is NOTHING - 40Gbps/wavelength is the pointSlow down a minute, folks - sending 40 Gbps over a fiber is trivial - it's been done by shipping, commercial telecom-grade DWDM (Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing) equipment for at least 5 years.
What's cool about this, is they put 40Gbps on a single carrier on a fiber. This means that, eventually, they can stack a bunch of 40Gbps carriers, on slightly different laser frequencies, in the same fiber to carry [1,2,4,8?]Tbps.
Commercial systems with the capacity to carry over a Terabit-per-second of data over a single fiber are already commercially available (and actually shipping) from companies like Ciena and probably Nortel. Lucent says they have equipment in the lab that is faster, but they're a bit like Microsoft in terms of making press releases long before they have working products, to inspire FUD in their competitor's potential customers...
:^) -
Funny thing about Lucent......is that they've been talking about putting terabits through fibers for a while, and showing it off in lab trials and demo systems, while Ciena is actually doing it in a commercial product and shipping it to customers who use it and depend on it to carry their data. Today.
Don't get me wrong - Lucent has some very smart scientists and engineers, and some great technology comes out of the ol' Bell Labs, but Lucent also has a FUD machine at least as effective as Microsoft's - check out this article at LightReading for some of the dirt.