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.
Although I am by no means a router expert, it would seem logical that a majority of the latency in the network is caused by the actual reception and subsequent "analysis" of the packets. After all, the "response time", or "spped" of electricity is at best close to the speed of light.
Thus, a majority of the time spent when moving packets around is probably spent on the routers, when processing the information. As such, switching to light based media should not have a noticable effect latency.
However, with the change of media, more data can probably be sent through the pipe, therefore increasing the overall speed of transfer in a favourable way.
Regardless, the technology certainly sounds exciting.
"The financial/managerial class has its own value system, based mostly on the necessity to monetize the company's assets. Firms have a responsibility to maximize the return on their investors' money, so every company asset must be leveraged to its utmost. This means that if you have developed a program that can be sold for $1,000,000 to four people in the world or $100 to three million people, it is your solemn duty to keep the price at $1,000,000, even if that means that 2,999,996 people who need that software will have to go without."
I can understand that gaining $4,000,000 instantly would be a very enticing alternative, but any sane business leader would surely choose option 2. Let's look at the theoretical maximum profit that can be made by the two options:
Option 1:
Selling at $1,000,000 for 4 people = $4,000,000
Option 2:
Selling at $100 for 3,000,000 people = $300,000,000
That's a ratio of 1:75 in terms of profit. I do realise that marketing a product to a larger audience would take a major part of that extra money, but from a business perspective it would also make (a maximum of) 3,000,000 people dependent on your product. We've already seen the amount of power that can come out of gaining a large market share (*cough*Microsoft*cough*), which the 3,000,000 people certainly would be.
Also one could argue that, only some of the 3,000,000 people would (for the sake of the argument let's say that they could buy) actually buy the product. However, due to the large proportional difference and the fact that apparently the people desperately need the product ("people who need that software..."), the first option would still be very difficult to dismiss from a profit perspective.
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Although I am by no means a router expert, it would seem logical that a majority of the latency in the network is caused by the actual reception and subsequent "analysis" of the packets. After all, the "response time", or "spped" of electricity is at best close to the speed of light.
Thus, a majority of the time spent when moving packets around is probably spent on the routers, when processing the information. As such, switching to light based media should not have a noticable effect latency.
However, with the change of media, more data can probably be sent through the pipe, therefore increasing the overall speed of transfer in a favourable way.
Regardless, the technology certainly sounds exciting.
I can understand that gaining $4,000,000 instantly would be a very enticing alternative, but any sane business leader would surely choose option 2. Let's look at the theoretical maximum profit that can be made by the two options:
Option 1:
Selling at $1,000,000 for 4 people = $4,000,000
Option 2:
Selling at $100 for 3,000,000 people = $300,000,000
That's a ratio of 1:75 in terms of profit. I do realise that marketing a product to a larger audience would take a major part of that extra money, but from a business perspective it would also make (a maximum of) 3,000,000 people dependent on your product. We've already seen the amount of power that can come out of gaining a large market share (*cough*Microsoft*cough*), which the 3,000,000 people certainly would be.
Also one could argue that, only some of the 3,000,000 people would (for the sake of the argument let's say that they could buy) actually buy the product. However, due to the large proportional difference and the fact that apparently the people desperately need the product ("people who need that software..."), the first option would still be very difficult to dismiss from a profit perspective.