Agreed. I don't see how this changes the problem of having an expensive (III-IV) device BEHIND the modulator.
If you want to send data quickly, you either need a fast (2.5Gb/s is industry standard now) vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL), or you need a cheap CD laser that can be electro-optically modulated quickly.
The other issue is that the cost of the standard 850nm laser inside a short-range fiber-optic module is only a small fraction of the total cost of the module. Decreasing the cost of one single component doesn't "change the world"...
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Agreed. I don't see how this changes the problem of having an expensive (III-IV) device BEHIND the modulator. If you want to send data quickly, you either need a fast (2.5Gb/s is industry standard now) vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL), or you need a cheap CD laser that can be electro-optically modulated quickly. The other issue is that the cost of the standard 850nm laser inside a short-range fiber-optic module is only a small fraction of the total cost of the module. Decreasing the cost of one single component doesn't "change the world"...