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Pure Optical Network Switches
richi wrote to us about the all optical switch that was announced from Agilent. The primary reason for the coolness factor is that an optical switch means that an optical signal doesn't need to be converted into electric at the switch, then back to optical.
Optical is the only way to fly, as electricity in copper is achieving its theoretical limits.
So does this mean we'll be getting 100% optical CPU's soon?
http://slashdot.org/<A HREF=
Wussup with you people?
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
Just noting that the link doesn't work.
Opinions expressed above are mine, and not my employees'.
See The Coming of the Fibersphere, a great essay about something that this switch makes possible.
eheheh, j/k
here's the link.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000306/ca_ agilent_2.html
Worst Sig Ever
The correct link is here...
I expect the URL should be: Agilent
All Optical! I have been waiting for this. Now what about the dark fiber?
]{
All I have to say is *drool*, someone wanna send me one of these for... St. Patty's day or something?
--NIVRAM
Since the link is broken at the moment, here's a link to the story: Agilent Optical Switch
Lucent did this about, what, a year ago? Read here. Nortel has already done this as well. Here's the Nortel link.
Optical switching is really cool, don't get me wrong! The slowest link in any big telco network is the switching equipment. How are you going to resolve Nortel's new 2.4Terabit pipes with OC-3 or OC-12 switching technology? Guess what, not happening.
Have a read about what Lucent and Nortel are doing...very cool stuff.
click here
Will my cable modem be faster ? what about DSL ? Or will i have a fiber optic connection to the internet by the time this means anything ?
Anyone remember that story that slashdot linked to many months ago about the companies that sell names to fledgling startups? The story mentioned the company Agilent.
What a coincidence!
I was wondering how they were gonna make mirrors that understood where a packet should go, but then I read the article. There's no mirrors. They're using a bubble-maker out of an old cannon printer. So they've made IP-aware bubbles instead. Or maybe it's that they have electronics reading the headers and then creating an optical route? That seems like it would be the weak link in the chain to me, but then, my mirror sometimes doesn't even get the picture of me back to my eyes right, let along reliably switching high-speed data...
The press release says the switch will operate by producing bubbles, like in inkjet printers?? Duh???
Why does inkjet always get described as being reliable? I've never been happy with inkjet products with the possible exception of my original HP Deskwriter. I can only imagine trying to troubleshoot connectivity problems on one of these things. What if you have a particular circuit that doesn't get used for a while. That ink is going to dry up and never inject! I'm really having a hard time even imagining how they can design "carrier class" equipment on inkjet technology.
Well, on Agilent's website, they say they use planar-lightwave circuits (whatever they are) that intersect at cross points. In the cross points, there's a fluid that allows the optical signal to pass through uninhibited. To reroute the signal, they insert bubbles into the cross point. The bubble refracts the signal, sending it to a different circuit. They say the bubbles can be generated and removed "hundreds of times per second". (See Introducing the Agilent Photonic Switching Platform for more technical details.)
So, my question is: Have they perfected some way of creating bubbles of the exact same size every single time, and if so, how? Bubbles don't seem (to me) to be something you can regulate by size easily. Anyone with more info, I'd love to be further informed.
Eruantalon
Eruantalon
The Annals of Middle-earth
No slashdot effect, just a typo in the link. You can find it here.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Photonic Crystals, Molding the Flow of Light
By Joannopoulos, Meade, & Winn
It's a bit mathy (Maxwell's equations) but describes how photonic wave guides work 'n such.
I didn't realize that the technology was anywhere close to commercial level yet, but I'm a bit curious about exactly what role the bubbles are playing. That's a take that I haven't heard before. It seems like if you have to form physical bubbles that your latency will be adversely affected... which was the whole point. I could be dumb though.
Too bad your link doesn't work. This one works though:
file:///c:\con\con
(please don't try this without saving your work)
It did a very effective job at crashing my W98 box... But then it crashes even without your link (I almost had to reboot my computer again after a near-crash experience when trying to post this comment the first time).
Thank you.
Working for the (other) man
This is a rather important development for optical networks. Other than the initial energy source and the receptor at the end of the line, this technology may be the last piece required for a fully optical system.
The previous important development in optical transmission networks was the optical amplifier. By doped sections of fiber with a high voltage placed across each section, they were able to create an amplifier. The light waves coming into the doped section of fiber would be amplified.
To briefly describe it, imagine blinking a small flashlight into a window. On the other side of the glass it looks like a car's headlight rather than a small flashlight.
Ok, this amplifier is cool but why is it important. The amplifier allowed companies to move away from light to electric to light. In fiber optic system, the signal decays as it travels through the fiber. Once it reaches a certain level, it will become unusable. Thus, you have to boost the signal periodically. Traditionally, communication companies had to take the decayed signal, convert it to electric, then you drive another laser with the weak electric signal. This then completes the light to electric to light again, and you now have a usable signal again. (Until you have to boost the signal again) Anyway, this conversion process created a whole new set of problems. By converting it to electric, you introduced noise. After a "amplifying" the signal a few times, your signal was no longer clean buy now included some noise.
This optical amplifier was important and lead to the FLAG system. If you read Wired a few years ago, they did a really good job of discussing FLAG. FLAG is the "Fiber Optic Link 'round the Globe" and is a _large_ undersea fiber optic cable reaching from UK, to Egypt, to Malaysia, to Japan. This project and other like it, became feasible because of optical amplifiers.
Optical switches are important for the same reason. It will reduce noise and increase reliability of the system.
I would not look to see these switches replace the current technology (as mentioned in a previous post). However, I would expect to see these switches start to become incorporated into new systems such as subsea communication, pipeline right-of-way bandwidth, or other cross country communication networks. There already is a big market for piping ESPN to parts of the country. Imagine that you could route the information more like a phone system than a gas pipeline. This could create a whole new market.
Hundreds of times a second? Please, we're moving to optical because of the bandwidth. Communications at the speed of light (in glass or plastic). We're talking multi-gigabits per second. And we want to switch packets at that speed with switches that can switch hundreds of times a second? Who can ponder the packet sizes required; megabytes to be sure.
Sorry, but switches that require the physical motion of sizeable amounts matter don't cut it for optical communications. If they were talking about nanotechnology, that might be another thing. But as it stands, this must be a warm-up for an April Fool's joke.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
...This bubble is formed using the same reliable technology now used in inkjet printers.
;-)
Erm... mybe I've been shopping for printers at the wrong places, but reliability is not what comes to mind when I think about inkjet bubbles...
And what are these bubbles made of? Where do they go? Will that switch be dripping from used bubble material? Will I have to refill cardridges?
bla
I don't think this is packet switching -- this is circuit switching.
Example: incoming fiber #5 has many channels multiplexed onto it. The circuit on channels #4567 needs to go out on fiber #2, but on a different channel, say #1234. This allows the switching to happen without converting the signal to electrons!
richi.
I know a guy who wasn't satisified with his ping times playing Quake over a modem. So he bought one of these and set up a lan in his house. His ping was less than 1 millisecond. . . to the machine with the modem. You wouldn't believe how much this switch helped with his pings online.
Well, as a Network Engineering Consultant in a Heavy Nortel Shop, I have had a chance to see the OPTera and Verselar 25000 in action. These devices are Electro/Optical not pure optical and I believe the break through with the Aligent device is that it is purely optical.
The Economics of Website Security
I was meaning to keep my mouth shut on this, but I've seen it one time too many lately: The editors of /. are obviously not very aware of the differences between "than" and "then". I've also seen "your" instead of "you're", "to" instead of "too".. I'm holding my breath waiting for "there's" instead of "theirs" :)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Nexabit which is a division of Lucent, called to offer me a job writing some code for a prototype of their 'terabit' router. Sorry I don't have all the details at hand, but I distinctly remember something about an optical switch.
I'm going to accept as soon as I feed my /. addiction.
It strikes me as amusing that this switch is going to be "vapor"-ware even after it ships...
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yesterday the link of a large european ISP went down, because they tried to replace the custom bubble-liquid cartridges of their HP optical switches with an el-cheapo no-name product. Other networks stalled when admins tried to refill their switches using a syringe... :-)
BTW, dont they have to determine where to swicht what? And they sure dont do that optically, so its still the copper and circuits slowing them down, not? Any answers?
That's not what this is designed for. You'd actually use it for things like this:
If a backbone node goes down, it's not going to go back up a microsecond later. You want to switch _all_ traffic to an alternate route, and then switch it back a few minutes or hours later when the node goes up again.
Think of this switch as acting something like a crossbar bus, connecting pipes point-to-point. Need more bandwidth between point a and point b? Allocate an additional pipe connecting them. Not using all bandwidth? Remove a pipe and allocate it to another pair of servers. Load patterns vary over minutes or hours, not microseconds, so this works fine.
Now, a purely-optical switch that _could_ work on the microsecond or nanosecond level would be very nice; however, a slower switch is still very useful.
An optical switch is one thing, but it doesn't do much that a technician swapping cables can't do (only slower). An optical router , now, that would be the biggest enabling technology for an all-optical network. It's also the most difficult.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Snip from the article:
The platform's flexible, modular architecture makes it easy to build optical cross connects (OXCs)
Seems that you can build router with these.
Jeff
stty erase ^H
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yes cool, but how does it extract the ip headers from the packets its routing?
Their claim is "pure optical is faster than optical-electronic-optical", but their system is "optical-bubble optical"--very slow.
I'm not sure just how fast the inkjet guys can make bubbles, but I estimate ~10,000/sec max based on printing rates. Compare than to MEMS mirrors and diffraction gratings which have been around for 10+ years and operate 10-100 times faster!
Bubbles sure as hell aren't replacing III-V semiconductor electro-optical devices, unless you can make about 10,000,000,000 bubbles/sec...
Loz
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
At OFC2000 today, Nanovation displayed new optical switches, splitters and modulators.
From their press release:
"These switches, splitters and modulators are the first of what will be an extensive offering of integrated photonic components from Nanovation. These products will help businesses and consumers access the full power of all-optical communications in a cost-effective manner," said G. Robert Tatum, president and CEO of Nanovation. "Companies will now be able to build their own customized, optical integrated circuits, thanks to the advanced capabilities of Nanovation components."
Nanovation's new and revolutionary Nanoshutterä technology outperforms other optical switching products by providing a latching switch mechanism for reduced power, very wideband operation, and the ability to integrate these switches with other functional components. This innovative patent-pending technology combines silicon MEMS switches with a proprietary silica-on-silicon wave-guide process, which will enable Nanovation to offer optical components not only with substantial size and cost advantages, but unparalleled flexibility in optical systems architecture - all on a single integrated device.
The offerings from the switch family using Nanoshutterä technology include versions of the following:
Wide band 1X2 optical switch
Wide band 1X2 optical switch with integrated 5% monitoring taps
Wide band 2X2 optical switch
Wide band 2X2 optical switch with integrated 5% monitoring taps
Wide band 1X4 optical switch
Wide band 1X8 optical switch
Wide band 1X16 optical switch
Nanovation's new offerings for the 1310 nm and 1550 nm telecommunications bands include versions of the following members of the silica-on-silicon wave-guide splitters product family using NanoblockTM technology.
Single mode 1X8 wide band optical splitter
Single mode 1X16 wide band optical splitter
Single mode 2X8 wide band optical splitter
Single mode 2X16 wide band optical splitter
The company also demonstrated its 1550 nm high-speed switching technology using Indium Phosphide materials. First components planned around this technology include sub-nanosecond optical switches and high-speed modulators.
A listing of their product line is here. You can download the specs there in PostScript format.
I have been following this company with some interest since their mention on /. Q1 1999.
A few years ago I saw an article about nanotech hinged mirrors. (hmm, I wonder if I read that on slashdot or not)
They are pretty much mirrors that lay flat and are raised at an angle but they are molecular scale. If I remember properly they weren't very quick. With more research something like this could be used to switch comminications or bits in a computer.
I think that the most exiting developments will come from quantum computers. Just imaging a computer that used quantum wells for communication. Theoretically this would allow instantanious communication between two points.
This isn't even going into quantum computers. This is simply using quantum technology to improve standard processors.
Binder
Don't see what all the fuss is about. I have had light switches in my house for as long as I can remember. My forefathers can remember a time before light switches though.
You can lead milk to a rolling horse, but too many cooks break glass houses.
You have morerate them all down and redundant?? That's the spirit. Let's go moderate the flooders. I really don't care if I read about grits, or trolls or Natalie ocassionally but I can do without a dozen Naked Jackie Chan's in a row. You must really be wound up tight.
This is supposed to be a place to discuss topics and generally enjoy what we do. Grow up!! Just ignore it if someone cuts up and gets a little sideways. Your moderation is what keeps the blatant ones going trying to see how far they can go. I finally figured that one out. No more posting replies to Don Knotts for me (Bye Frank).
I was going to post anonomously but decided unsigned letters don't carry much weight. What was I going to do with that karma anyway?
/End rant Optical switches are a great idea. I know that media converters have the source of way too many problems where I worked at. The fiber connections were nice but the problems came when making transitions between medias.
I want a 100Mb/sec fiber pipe to my condo, and I want it now! (grin)
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
A transister is basicly just a type of switch. We had tube transisters in the 1920's then discreet component transisters 1942, and finally transisters on a silicon chip. Each new generation of transister offered tremendous improvements over the prior. Now we are beginning to hear about the possibility of creating optical transisters.
For those of you who don't read Star Trek news that means photon based computing! Keep up the good reporting this really is stuff that matters.
it's weird: the two guys in the photo must be the only researchers in the place without beards. Maybe they made them shave to be more photogenic for the popular press.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
This must explain why HP/Agilent has been agressively recruiting people with strong backgrounds in injet modeling and simulation.
That seemed suspicious. Now we know at least one big part of what they were scheming. Very clever design, it seems.
1) why would you run network infrastructure underwater without shielding it? that's supremely dumb; I don't think you can even buy network copper without some minimal shielding (unless you're buying copper wire in bulk...)
2)fiber optic cable run underwater WILL DEGRADE over time, ESPECIALLY in salt water. Why? The reflective coating around the fiber wears away (water IS the universal solvent, even if it takes a looong time to act on some materials, yes even glass and stone dissolve eventually). And degraded coating==lost packets. I think this holds for single- and multi-mode both.
Ok, now someone who works for a world class ISP will post something that totally disproves everything I just said, and insults my ancestors. :)
my 2 cents.
~Phyruxus
No moving parts seems to really mean, no moving pieces which could wear out or malfunction(alternatively, no moving parts which are manufactured); I find common usage misleading and highly irritating since obviously there is something moving in there, namely the bubble. Now, obviously SOMETHING is moving in there, at the very least the air/whatever interface that defines the bubble. Furthermore, the air molecules themselves have to move somewhere or else this bubble couldn't expand and contract.
So, what would I consider TRULY no moving parts? welllll, teeeechnically, I would have to say only a truly absolute-Zero-kelvin device, in which no physical material moves. This is of course, assuming that one draws the distinction between "part" and "non part" at the macroscopic matter level. Below that, according to the physics I know (limited to undergrad courses), it's not appropriate to talk about "stopping" a quark or electron, because they have wave-nature and hence cannot exist in a truly static state. BTW, some guy proved that all matter and energy has wave nature, so basically I'm saying that I want the phrase "no moving parts" banned from speech indefinitely, until our tech advances enough for it to be appropriate; along with "all natural" (as in jelly (since nothing prohibited by 'natural law' can exist in the first place)) and "military intelligence" (that's a cheap shot, folks;)
Before everyone rushes to flame me, I want to point out that I DO realize how anal I am being, and that it's still cool tech, and a breakthrough, and all that good stuff. I drank too much coffee today and I need to type a lot or else my brain will leak out my ears. Ok, flame on.
~Phyruxus
I've got wide staring eyes; an' I've got a strong urge to fly.. but I've got nowhere to fly to..
And I know I'm just as bad, but I don't care.
Optical switches will not work on a per packet basis. The ideas on the table in the IETF talk about using the signalling technique of multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) to create a connectful path across the network. This idea is very similar to the functionality that ATM offered. Except that MPLS signalling protocols are IP aware. These same technique will be used to create Lambda switch paths across an all optical backbone.
I saw the story on slashdot. They were using micromirrors, and it cut heat output and power consumption by 99%.
As for the future of optronic computing, I think we're still a long way off. We don't even know what to do with quantum yet. Still, it looks promising, given that I (hopefully) will still be alive in 50 years to this happen.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
This is a good step forward, but it's not the type of switch most people assume when they see the word 'switch'. It looks like Agilent has the world's first pure optical cross connect, which is a significant development.
Single fibres are never installed, there are always multiples, so that if one gets damaged/breaks/hit by backhoe, there is another that (hopefully) didn't get damanged, and the equipment switches to the backup. That's the application I see for this Agilent development.
Transmitters for 2.4 Gbit/S optics are EXPENSIVE, can generate a lot of HEAT, and are fairly LARGE. So if you have multiple redundant connections, you currently need mulitple redundant transmitters! Not a great investment... BUT if you can take 1 transmitter and use a 'pure-optical switch' (better known, probably, as a cross-connect) to connect it to one of N possible fibres, well... it saves money and could improve reliability.
Not only that, but it's independent of the actual technology on the fibre. So it can switch OC-3's (155 MHz-ish), OC-12's (622 MHz-ish), OC-48's (2.4 GHz-ish), and wave-division multiplexed (multi-wavelength lasers on a single fibre) without caring about it... 'cause it's just a mirror!
This is a Good Thing (tm). HP might not be the first to do it (I had a college professor that was using microelectronic machines [MEMS] to do something similar), but it seems they might be the first to mass-product it.
Just to clarify. The Agilent unit isn't a router, and doesn't know diddley about IP. It's merely an inexpensive optical switch. In order to route light, you have to route lambdas, and not packets. Which would mean changing the paradigm yet again. Maybe in another hundred years!
A super broad band net will facilitte two-way
video in every room of your house, office, public
building and portable message devices.
That is the ultimate end of the net.
Maybe around 2020.
Yesterday, Cisco announced
it will create "the the first end-to-end, all optical network to deliver Internet access service...." They talk about providing 100x T1 speed for each customer for the price of a T1. Yikes.
I'll miss copper, we had many good times together. My first computer was a magnet wrapped with a copper wire (you could call it a 286 too.) Hopefully fiberoptics will get better. Just think, in 50 years we'll find something better then fiber-optic, and everyone will be pissed because we yoink up everything again and replace it. The only thing is the fiber-optic line put up by my telephone company stops 1 telephone pole before my house. It sucks!! now I can't get ADSL (Zoomtown here in cincinati). I hate living out in the country! I might have to share it with my neigbor and run Coax. networking underground to use it.
Actually, water is very bad for fiber. If I remember correctly from class, its the -OH ion in particular that interferes with and degrades the fiber.
Most, if not all, outdoor fiber is encased in some sort of shielding to protect it from UV rays, water and rodents (squirrels, mice, rats, etc). Submarine fibers are encased in multiple layers of metal and other materials to form a heavy protective cable. Some possible water hazards -- sharp rocks, anchors, propellors, sharks (yes, sharks!), and obviously the water itself.
Who cares? Agilent advertises a sub 10ms switching system. Lucent's Wavestar Lambdarouter advertises a sub 1ms switching using their microstar MEMS system. I lifted the following off of Lucent's website. I hope they don't mind my pimping their system: "The optical layer bandwidth management used in the WaveStar LambdaRouter is made available thanks to Lucent Technologies MicroStar Technology. MicroStar Technology leverages Bell Labs' patented research in the area of Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) technology. "MicroStar technology is used to attain relatively large switching fabrics with sub-millisecond switching speed and a small product footprint. MicroStar relies on an array of hundreds of electrically configurable microscopic mirrors fabricated on a single substrate to direct light. The switching concept is based on freely moving mirrors being rotated around micro-machined hinges." Lucent's Lambdarouter is already commercially available along with an entire sweet of complementary products. Agilent won't have their product available until late 2000. Sounds like a game of catch-up to me. All of these poor suckers who ran up the price of Agilent stock might want to get out while the getting is good. Check out these two companies websites and tell me who you think will win.