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Lucent Makes 10 Terabit Router
maladroit wrote to us with an interesting press release from Lucent Technologies. The former Bell company has made a breakthru using microscopic mirrors in fiber that will allow data to be carried at upwards of ten times current speeds. Supposedly, a ten terabit router has already been created, and it will be rolled out to the public towards the end of next year.
Now that 60+ Mb DSL becomes much more feasable. Yea Baby!
-Al-
is "wow!"
That is some serious data transfering! (does that sound stupid to anyone else?)
Seriously:
Will any other hardware be able to keep up with this any time soon? Or is this just a ISP trunk-type device that users won't see for a very long time?
Will this be availible to (for instance) my local ISP, giving better throughput?
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
If companies start incorporating this technology into their networks, will we see:
1) an end to the "slashdot effect"
2) download sites that have enough anonymous logins for everyone
and 3) voice over IP and streaming video for trivial cost
or simply more "First post" and "Wow, think of a Beowulf cluster of THOSE things!" messages to Slashdot. In fact, think of a Beowulf cluster using 10 terabit switched channels... *SMACK!*
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
If this means I'll be able to finally get decent speed on my cable modem (Austin is rather congested), then I'm all for it. On a side note: maybe those gigabit ethernet cards will finally have a purpose...
Offtopic, but this highlights the main reason I believe Lucent will dominate over Cisco.
Lucent continually impresses me with their labs... breeding new technologies from within. Cisco, on the other hand, devotes very little to research. They do have an agreement with IBM for work on e-business applications but they are forced to buy the majority of their new technologies. While that is easy for them right now, with their $200 billion plus market cap, no debt and huge cash reserves, that can't last forever. Hell, the price thatthe paid for Cerent was simply outrageous! $7 billion for a company with revenues (and no profits) of approximately $20 million a year!?
Not to forget them buying Montery Systems, Transmedia, StratumOne, MaxComm, Calista, KPMG Consulting... hell, there are over 20 in the past 6 months.
In the long run, it just seems so much more cost efficient to invest that money into your own research and development, like Lucent does. But, I could be wrong.
Or perhaps you could learn to spell like a normal human-being. Why don't you grow up, you twit.
Isn't there some way that Rob could implement some kind of script that would search for keywords (script kiddie nonsense and f1rst post bull) and filter them out?
I would rather a moderator spend his/her points in getting worthwhile things moderated up.. than worthless trash like this moderated into oblivion.
--
rJames.org - illustration
This is more like a very special patch panel than a router. It is NOT a breakthrough in optical computing, or a computing device at all. It uses tiny mirrors (and maybe some tiny smoke *grin*) to direct different wavelengths of light coming off one port to different ports. It apparently does NO routing or inspection, it just sends light from one fiber to another.
Not to say this isn't interesting, but let's not get carried away and declare Lucent the ruler of high-speed optical routing yet!
You can already make free domestic (including AK and HI) PC to POTS (or PC to PC) calls at dialpad.com.
Admittedly they don't have enough lines to meet demand yet, and there is a little latency effect when you do get an open line. But as far as costs, I expect it will be awhile until they start paying us place calls.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
(Unlike the present-day situation, where most corporate networks remind me of a concussed ferrit in a molasses-filled pipe, with concrete boots. Though what a pipe is doing, wearing boots, I don't know. :)
Personally, I would like to advocate that Lucent promote this technology to the world at large, by offering 4 such routers as prizes in a sweepstake, held on Slashdot. What does everyone else think?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...for a couple of weeks, until all the bandwidth gets wiped out by people downloading 10 times as much porn, playing 10 times as many online games and sending even larger numbers of mp3's by email. And then, after the fortnight where everything is glorious we all go back to 20 seconds of lag on our telnet connections and 2 bytes a second on out ftp.
Cynical?
That is *exactly* what happened in the good old days of the early 90's when I was an eager student and superjanet revolutionised my connection, for about a week.
Almost any communications medium would allow this. Just change the size of the library. It's a meaningless phrase!
And its capacity will grow even further over time.
Does this mean it will upgrade itself automatically, for free?
Argh!
You connect the dots, you pick up the pieces.
I'm justed amazed that the data movers are coming up with new techniques as fast as the data producers can come up with stuff to send.
Of course, I'm still waiting for advances like this to filter down to us plebians who just want symmetric 10 Mbit cable modem access. :)
Um... just 'cause you can *feed* a wire really fast, doesn't mean that the wire can handle it. For example, try putting your face under a hose at full blast and drinking. Good luck swallowing!! DSL has inherent problems with line length, conditioners (coils) on the line, splits, impedance, and a number of other problems. When I worked in the lab of a very very big DSL provider, we were lucky to get 7mb/s... 60 is ridiculous using copper at 12,000 feet, but good luck!
From the article:
[corporate BS deleted] said it had created a router -- the equipment that directs traffic from one segment of a network to another -- capable of delivering 10 terabits, or trillion bits, of data per second, 10 times that of rival products.
Now, it may not be apparent how Lucent looks at packets with mirrors in order to route them correctly, but if you take them at their literal word (a risky idea for a new product) then yes, they say twice in the release it is a router.
The smoke is the most important part in determing the destination address when routing anyway.........
I wanna know how you decrement the IP hop count with a mirror.....
The only thing I can think is that this "router" Lucent is hawking isn't really a router as you normally think of one. Instead, its just a optical network hub. It doesn't really do an routing, it just transfers traffic from one fiber to another in some predetermined way.
While the rates quoted are quite impressive, what I find more significant is the all-optical nature of this router. A router is not that far from a general-purpose computer. So what could this mean for an all-optical computer?
Jack it directly into the phone trunk, and surf the datastream. While using the same computer to run the fastest single SETI-at-home on the planet.
If Lucent can produce these things in serious volume, I predict we'll start seeing all-optical supercomputers living on terabit LANs with data warehouses nearby.
-----
Klactovedestene!
I would really like more information on the internal workings of this thing. I would like to know how this router will deal with input/output queueing and buffering. Currently, most routers have to buffer data while the logical connnections neccessary for routing to occur are negotiated within the routing table. I wonder how Lucent plans to buffer an optical signal without converting it to an electrical signal and storing it in RAM. I could forsee them employing a cut-through technique with virtual circuits between interfaces, but that would only really be practical in a switching environment rather than a routing environment. I what kind of an engine Lucent has come up with to switch packets without buffering them. Anyone know?
Besides the impressive technology Lucent has managed to create here, think of the possibilities for the internet that this presents. The current backbones of the 'net dont have the capacity to deal with the huge amounts of data that will soon be flowing across them due to the high amount of Cable/DSL circuits that are being turned up all across the country, but if major Tier 1 ISPs start employing these Lucent routers and other all-fibre routers that I'm sure will follow soon, the backbone may just survive the next few years without imploding on itself. Cool.
-Phizzy
phizzy@psynet.net
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
It seems to be awsome technology, but, for now, it will not aleviate our usual complaints: latency and our local bandwidth.
This will benefit the carriers, those companies like Qwest, etc. wich have massive fiber deployments and only the largests ISPs.
From the relese, it mentions that it will route lambdas, or wavelengths, but not what interfaces it will have (oc3, oc12...oc192, fddi, etc) or wether it will do ip routing. It will probably only accept > oc48. The bottleneck will be moved more and more towards the edge, but the latency is not addressed (for a single ip packet); therefore,
without QOS rules and such, high quality interactive video and voice for the normal user are still far away.
cheers,
Frank
PS. did you guys hear about Nortel and Intel partnering on Open ip and IX ?
A truth that's told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent. -- William Blake
This is NOT a router for IP, it is a router for WAVES. Read DWDM please.
The optical switch technology is used to switch diffrent lambdas through the switches.
Primary use would be if you wanted to by a Wave on a carrier's fiber. (much cheaper than buying the fiber, because you don't have to light it up and maintain it yourself)
So, the bottom line is, now I can buy a wave that crosses several pieces of fiber, and can be re-routed in case of a fiber cut!
Depends. Is it high-order smoke, or low-order smoke? Also, is it aluminium-based, or copper?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wonder what they mean by "terabyte" speeds. I would be more concerned about latency (How fast does it handle complex filtering rules, or NAT / load balancing?) and the maximum /effective/ bandwidth...
--
Look at http://www.switchcore.com they got the product that will rock your home network. Gigabit stuff
Luck is opportunity meets preparation, lets get lucky
Very impressive, maybe, if they'd made that announcement last week, or last month. But in the same day that Lucent starts shipping routers over 1000 times faster? It becomes less staggering and more "why did they buy the cheap stuff"?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This type of device is obviously a good thing(tm), however, I don't see it making a big difference in what we as the end users see for a long time.
For one, just because you have a router that can switch packets at 10 Tbps, that doesn't mean you have the money to support the fiber lines you would need to even come close to those kinds of speed, much less pay for someone to route traffic over it to you. It is also likely that your local telco doesn't have the capacity at your CO just yet to support this either.
Also, what happens when you start slapping on filters and access lists and start doing some layer 3 routing on top of this machine? Does performance degrade? Most likely. While being able to read packets at line rate is great, the real obstacle is to be able to build a full-fledged routing device that can route and filter at line rates. There is a huge difference.
Don't get me wrong, this is a great breakthrough, but don't expect to see the end of the Slashdot effect just yet.
-B
So would it make sense for Lucent to be rolling these out with a service agreement with a fiber optics company, say... Qwest?
Thats about 200,000 channels of simulataneous NTSC quality video. InterNet bandwidth growth will continue until there is interactive video in every bedroom, office, vehicle, and palm. Assuming that everyone in the USA will be working, communicating or being entertained by video at least half the time, we'll need at least a thousand of these routers for 200 million channels.
I sent this story to a friend of mine... and he had this to say (-: ... assuming 10 bits per byte, and then lets say 10% overhead for routing packets and crap, thats .9 terabytes per second, which means you could fill a 900 gig hard drive in one second. Let's give Win2k and various bloated applications a full 20 gig Now you have 880 gig of porn. If you only have high quality jpg's, lets say 250K each, which is 4 per meg. 880 gig = 880,000 meg, multiplied by 4 = 3,520,000 spank-pics. Now, lets say you spank 3 times a day on average. From age 18 to age 90, (no one spanks before they are 18, we have laws ;) that is 72 years, which is 26,280 days, which is 78,840 spanks. I'll just assume that during a typical spank, an average person might flip through 20 pics. Now we need 1,576,800 pics. This tell us that in less than a second, this router can deliver enough pics for 3 lifetimes of spanking, with no repeat pics (G)
...there are still a hell of alot of people using 33.6k modems, calling C range access numbers, praying for 3k/s.
I sent this story to a friend of mine... and he had this to say (-: ... assuming 10 bits per byte, and then lets say 10% overhead for routing packets and crap, thats .9 terabytes per second, which means you could fill a 900 gig hard drive in one second. Let's give Win2k and various bloated applications a full 20 gig (G) Now you have 880 gig of porn. If you only have high quality jpg's, lets say 250K each, which is 4 per meg. 880 gig = 880,000 meg, multiplied by 4 = 3,520,000 spank-pics. Now, lets say you spank 3 times a day on average. From age 18 to age 90, (no one spanks before they are 18, we have laws ;) that is 72 years, which is 26,280 days, which is 78,840 spanks. I'll just assume that during a typical spank, an average person might flip through 20 pics. Now we need 1,576,800 pics. This tell us that in less than a second, this router can deliver enough pics for 3 lifetimes of spanking, with no repeat pics (G)
Capitalist nationalism in the works of Lucent
1. Discourses of stasis
"Class is responsible for class divisions," says Lacan; however, according to Wilson[1] , it is not so much class that is responsible for class divisions, but rather the nothingness, and subsequent stasis, of class. Modernist discourse holds that sexuality may be used to exploit the Other. In a sense, in La Dolce Vita, Lucent examines capitalist nationalism; in The City of Women, Lucent denies the subtextual paradigm of expression.
"Class is fundamentally impossible," says Habermas. Sartre promotes the use of neodialectic appropriation to modify sexual identity. In a sense, Faustroll[2] implies that the works of Lucent are modernistic. Adorno suggests the use of capitalist nationalism to challenge the hegemony of hierarchy.
If modernist discourse holds, we have to choose between the subtextual paradigm of expression and capitalist nationalism. Thus, Mensonge's critique of pretextual capitalism suggests that the raison d'etre of the reader is deconstruction, given that modernist discourse is invalid. Therefore, a number of theories concerning modernist discourse exist.
Saussure uses the term 'the subtextual paradigm of expression' to denote the common ground between sexual identity and society. The subject is interpolated into a Marxist capitalism that includes art as a reality.
But Lacan suggests the use of modernist discourse to deconstruct sexism. In a sense, the primary theme of Cameron's[3] essay on capitalist nationalism is the rubicon of subcultural culture. The example of Foucauldian power relations intrinsic to The City of Women emerges again in Satyricon.
2. The subtextual paradigm of expression and structuralist capitalist theory
In the works of Lucent, a predominant concept is the distinction between opening and closing. Many narratives concerning Baudrillardian simulation exist. Thus, the premise of structuralist capitalist theory holds that the law is part of the genre of narrativity. D'Erlette[4] states that we have to choose between the subtextual paradigm of expression and capitalist nationalism.
"Sexual identity is unattainable," says Bataille. But Debord suggests the use of structuralist capitalist theory to attack capitalism.
The characteristic theme of Sargeant's[5] model of the subtextual paradigm of expression is the role of the participant as observer. However, Lyotard uses the term 'cultural Marxism' to denote not narrative, as capitalist nationalism suggests, but postnarrative.
The subject is contextualised into a capitalist nationalism that includes language as a whole. It could be said that the main theme of the works of Madonna is the bridge between class and sexual identity. Sontag's analysis of structuralist capitalist theory holds that reality is a product of the masses.
The primary theme of Abian's[6] critique of premodernist capitalist theory is the role of the artist as participant.
3. Eco and the subtextual paradigm of expression
"Society is fundamentally used in the service of outdated perceptions of culture," says Derrida. Any number of desituationisms concerning a self-justifying paradox may be found. It could be said that in Foucault's Pendulum, Eco affirms capitalist nationalism; in The Name of the Rose, however, Eco deconstructs dialectic materialism. The subject is interpolated into a structuralist capitalist theory that includes art as a paradox.
But Mensonge uses the term 'capitalist nationalism' to denote the praxis, and some would say the failure, of textual class. However, if the subtextual paradigm of expression holds, we have to choose between capitalist nationalism and Sartrean absurdity. The primary theme of Buxton's[7] model of the subtextual paradigm of expression is the difference between class and society.
Adorno promotes the use of semantic dialectic theory to analyse sexual identity. Therefore, the ground/figure distinction which is a central theme of Foucault's Pendulum is also evident in The Name of the Rose, although in a more mythopoetical sense. The premise of structuralist capitalist theory suggests that consciousness is capable of truth. Many narratives concerning capitalist nationalism exist.
4. Consensuses of collapse
If one examines Saussurean semiotics, one is faced with a choice: either accept the subtextual paradigm of expression or conclude that reality, paradoxically, has objective value. In a sense, Bataille uses the term 'capitalist nationalism' to denote the role of the poet as writer.
The characteristic theme of the works of Eco is a self-sufficient totality. The subject is interpolated into a cultural subtextual theory that includes truth as a whole.
In the works of Eco, a predominant concept is the concept of semioticist narrativity. De Selby[8] implies that we have to choose between the subtextual paradigm of expression and structuralist capitalist theory. But the characteristic theme of the works of Eco is not, in fact, theory, but posttheory. The premise of the subtextual paradigm of expression holds that government is part of the absurdity of sexuality, but only if capitalist nationalism is valid; if that is not the case, Baudrillard's model of constructive libertarianism is one of "precapitalist materialism", and thus unattainable.
"Class is part of the fatal flaw of language," says Lacan; however, according to Reicher[9] , it is not so much class that is part of the fatal flaw of language, but rather the genre, and thus the meaninglessness, of class. The praxis, and eventually the futility, of capitalist nationalism intrinsic to The Name of the Rose emerges again in Foucault's Pendulum. However, Habermas suggests the use of structuralist capitalist theory to attack the entrenched hegemony of patriarchialist ideology over sexual identity. Thus, Marx uses the term 'the subtextual paradigm of expression' to denote the rubicon, and subsequent defining characteristic, of subpatriarchialist society.
Du Garbandier[10] states that we have to choose between cultural narrative and the subtextual paradigm of expression. Foucault's essay on capitalist nationalism implies that consciousness serves to entrench the hegemony of the status quo, given that art is interchangeable with narrativity. Several desituationisms concerning structuralist capitalist theory exist. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a precapitalist paradigm of reality that includes truth as a reality.
Derrida uses the term 'capitalist nationalism' to denote not theory, as Sontag would have it, but neotheory. The main theme of Dietrich's[11] essay on the subtextual paradigm of expression is a material totality. It could be said that Parry[12] states that we have to choose between dialectic deconstructivism and structuralist capitalist theory.
Adorno promotes the use of the subtextual paradigm of expression to attack hierarchy.
Thus, Hamburger[13] holds that the works of Wood are reminiscent of Koons. However, the premise of Saussurean semiotics suggests that the task of the reader is significant form. Mensonge uses the term 'capitalist nationalism' to denote the bridge between society and sexual identity.
In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a subtextual paradigm of expression that includes culture as a paradox. Any number of narratives concerning the role of the observer as artist may be revealed. The primary theme of the works of Stone is the dialectic of subtextual sexuality. Therefore, Finnis[14] holds that we have to choose between capitalist nationalism and structuralist capitalist theory.
10 t/b! Horray! I think this is the minimum bandwith requirment for the upcoming office2002 rent edition that runs over the internet.
I think it might still be a little slow for the next version of dcom.
This is the old Nexbit Router.
don't bet on it being in a production network 'for real' anytime in the next 6-8 months.
There have been a flurry of press releases on that damn thing for the last few months, and none of them have been substantiated.
WOW!!! with that, we can do some REALLY serious VR Mabey in a year or two, HTML browsers will become obsolete, making way for new virtual interfaces
As a unit of time was not used in conjunction with the unit of data, nothing special is said. Every router on the planet is capable of terabit transfer, given enough time. I think what the article meant to say was 10 Terabits/s. Also, please stop saying "duh can my ISP use this for my ADSL connection?". Your ISP will never have the capitol, nor the need, for that kind of router. It will be used for backbones. Period. --Slashdot: Stuipidity Gradient uncoupled from cash turbines.--
"Makes"..."Created"...
You'd think it's alive!
calm down yer affection fer the router!
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Thanks for that post! It is notes like that that makes /. worth the time and effort.
For those of us that are a bit hazy on the finer points of Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), there is a very decent tutorial by Lucent at http://www.webproforum.com/dwdm/topic0 1.html.
More list of resources can be found at http://www.atmdigest.com/WDMResources.htm (DWDM specific), http://disa11.disa.atd.net/tutoria l/tutorial.htm (general ATM), and at your favourite search engines.
Hi!
As mentioned several times previously, the main box featured in this article is a DWDM router, not an IP router. There is a big difference, because they do very different things. See previous posts for details.
Lucent just recently finished their purchase of Nexabit, a private datacomm company. Nexabit currently is shipping the NX64000, a true 6.4 terabit IP router mentioned at the bottom of the article.
Lucent is the only company I know of capable of routing OC-48 IP at line speed. They have imminent plans to route OC-192 IP at line speed, and I expect them to release it soon. Some can route gigabit ethernet, but routing OC-48 and up is where the men are separated from the boys.
Lucent has one other competitor in the terabit routing space, and that is Juniper. Juniper is the only other company actually shipping a product. Avici, Zuma, NEO, Ironbridge, and Pluris all claim to have products, but aren't actually shipping anything capable of routing more than 1 terabit across their backplane/switch fabric.
In any case, Lucent's box has the most single-chassis bandwidth of any competitor. Several of the aforementioned companies are trying to play PR games by stringing multiple boxes together, but you definitely can't achieve terabit speeds by daisy-chaining boxes.
All of this information is true to the best of my knowledge, as I have personally talked with all companies I mentioned above. If I were an ISP, the box of choice would be a no-brainer.
The opinions I post here have nothing to do with my employer.
Most people in the Internet world use router to mean something that switches packets at layer 3.
Almost everything else is called a switch, so I think this should be called a DWDM switch, since it is working at layer 2 with DWDM (or maybe layer 1 depending on how you look at it). (DWDM = Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or shoving several colours of light down a single fibre.)
This sort of kit will be very useful though - before too long it should be possible to run DWDM to the customer premises, but even before that heady prospect DWDM should make it possible for xDSL and cable modems to run closer to full speed.
All we need now is faster servers and 10-gigabit ethernet (which a standards group is working on I think).
This is an optical switch - it's best IMO to think of it as a layer 2 switch connecting a number of different routers with very fast 'logical wires' - each link will use a number of wavelengths, and the switch presumably converts stuff from one wavelength to another (though if it's all mirrors maybe they have to stay on the same wavelength).
There is some other work using tunable laser transmitters and corresponding receivers, which lets you set up a LAN-like structure on DWDM - this seems more like a L2 switch, analogous to the way ATM virtual channels can be used to connect IP routers.
The world will still need very fast IP routers, though - if you have too many IP routers connected via a DWDM cloud, you run into problems with the routing process in the router 'seeing' too many neighbours and thereby working inefficiently (particularly if an interface somewhere starts going up and down frequently - known as route flapping).
The real issue for IP usage is how on earth do you build routers fast enough to keep up with all the wavelengths pouring out of a single fibre? Terabit routers will address this through massive parallelism, but they don't come cheap.
I would expect that this will have little effect on most end users. Except for one place, your local movie theater. I would expect these types of devices are what would be needed to deliver the kind of bandwidth needed to distribute completely digital movies, like the special showings of Phantom Menace this summer, to the thousands of theaters across the country.
;)
The only real problem with this scheme is how do you feed a pipe like this.
How does this compare with the latest (or annonced version) of similar product by Cisco, Nortel,
I think Press Release often look like fantasy essay.
Hmm. I wonder if quantum communication could make use of this, since it doesn't convert to electric and back. Any Idea?
...OK, so we run a 10 terabit backbone from NYC to SF, for instance. Then everyone starts selling their 100 gigabit routers super cheap, and every ISP on the planet buys two or three, and drops redundant links. The effect? Same as we have now. Except instead of trying to push a terabit down a gigabit pipe, we're pushing petabits down a terabit pipe. Same effect, just larger orders of magnitude. And remember, the number of people on the internet is doubling like twice a week now. I know, that's not accurate, but damn, sometimes it feels that way.
/., eating bandwidth like it's going out of style.
60Mbit DSL to the doorstep isn't viable. Neither is 100FX to my bedroom from my ISP. In reality, even a T1 to every house really isnt viable. Yeah, I'd be a helluva lot happier with an OC-12 to my desk so I could download StarOffice in 14 seconds flat, but I'm happy with a quarter-meg DSL or a 128K ISDN. It's not too slow, I can download a linux kernel in 15 minutes as opposed to an hour. In fact, I'm all for discouraging faster internet access. Yes, you and I will be limited to the "paltry" 128K... but the backbone won't be crushed.
If you have, for instance, one million DSL users running at 768K, that's 768 million kilobits of bandwidth. 768 gigabits. And we all know there's prolly many more than a million now.
And then there's the college students. They do porn, MP3's, and warez like it's a requirement for graduation. For example, my uni, Drexel University, has a DS3. UPenn has 2. Temple has a 5 meg FDS3. TJU has a 16 meg FDS3. That's just the major colleges in -ONE- -CITY-, eating up 200 megabits. Then there's PSU, Pitt, and the other 49 states, etc etc....
Then we have commercial entities like connexion.com, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, and our favorite news for nerds site
10 terabit is good. But we need to stop letting technologies like this creep out towards the edge, because it clogs the core. Ah hell, I'm just ranting. But my UserFriendly was slow this morning, and now I know why. Some smartassed kid who came into some money bought himself a 10tbit line and started mirroring every porn site on earth.
--jd
"To err is human, to forgive is simply not my policy." --root
You've gotta give credit where credit is due. The only reason Lucent is announcing this is because they've just completed their merger with Nexabit. This isn't something that's come out of Lucent's R&D, this came soley from Nexabit.
PS - the telco I work for has one of these in our lab, including over half of the cards in existance today...it's a sweet box!
I made one of these a little while ago, by accident. Spilling marine diesel into the ocean provides the same technology.
:wq