Hollow Optical Fibres Can Now Process Signals

Ami_Chan writes: "According to Nature, researchers at Bell Labs have created a new type of optical fibre. This fibre is hollow, and can be tuned to different wavelengths of light using 'plugs of fluid' and temperature changes within the fibre. This allows the fibres to process signals as well as transmit them. The full article is here."

Comments

how long a run till you don't save money

[Pi-Zero Meson]

Alright this does sound fascinating and all but fiber is already really expensive and so are filters for breaking down the transmission into it's composite "colors" but it seems to me that it wouldn't take much run of this new and presumably much more expensive fiber to pay for the filters.

Pump

[totallygeek]

The story mentions fluid pumping. This means moving parts, which means more chance for failure. If the speed does not jump by several orders of magnitude, or the distance limitations disappear, I don't see why anyone would install the technology built around this.

"End-to-end" versus "smarts in the network"

[dpbsmith]

OK, I understand the researchers were doing very cool things that might have a whole range of interesting uses, but...

I thought the whole lesson of the Internet was that the network should provide connectivity only, with a bare minimum of built-in processing...

because, if you put processing into the network you are making fundamental assumptions about how the network is going to be used. In other words, processing within the network = optimizing for predetermined uses = locking out future evolution and outside innovation.

Shades of the old Bell Labs that were committed to circuit-switching and opposed to packet-switching!