Internet Heading to Light Speed

dbaker writes "Wired Magazine has a very interesting article about the future of optical networks and the barriers we face before this technology is commonplace."

Comments

A "light" transistor to the rescue!

[erick99]

The buckyball layer produces what sounds like a transistor of sorts:

The gluing process creates a material composed of larger electron-rich molecules with sufficient power to cause light that passes through to control the direction of other light, providing the switching capability, Sargent said.

With switching occuring at the speeds available through a layer such as that, there would be an incredible decrease in cumulative latency across the 'net. That is, if all or most of the switches are as above.

Superconnect's Lehenbauer agrees that "it's fascinating" to have material for an optical switch, but warns "it could be awhile until an all-optical network is possible."

I wonder what the cost of those type "devices" will be - both direct in terms of the devices and indirect in terms of whatever infrastructure is required to implement them. Well, either way, it's great sounding technology.

Cheers,

Erick

Planning for the Future

[The Subliminal Kid]

Redundancy may soon be more vital than speed.

Once the internet was designed to withstand problems (a euphemism for a nuclear strike) at multiple nodes but since commercial interest like to keep as many things as possible in one building we see today that a small fire in a maintenance tunnel has a dramatic effect on the over all network latency. There just isn't as much redundancy as there used to be and that may be worse for us all than your download time for SP2.