Is this announcement significant? I recall someone asking if there was a fiber optic switch available and this appears to be the answer.
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TUESDAY OCTOBER 27 1998 Telecoms
Marconi and Nokia claim bottleneck breakthroughs
By Alan Cane in London and Tim Burt in Stockholm
British Aerospace has taken out an insurance policy to protect against a drop in income from leases on 600 regional aircraft.
The company announced yesterday it would take a £38m ($64.6m) exceptional charge net of tax in this year's accounts to reflect the one-off premium cost of the 15-year policy.
Marconi Communications of the UK and Nokia of Finland are separately claiming advances in transmission technology which they say should help ease bottlenecks in the world's telecommunications networks as customer numbers grow rapidly.
Marconi is expected to make public its breakthrough today at an exhibition in Beijing. It is claiming to be the first company to have developed a method of switching and routing calls optically rather than electronically.
Meanwhile Nokia yesterday announced a range of products which, it said, could significantly increase the capacity of GSM digital mobile phone networks.
Optical technology, in which information travels along fine glass fibre cables in the form of light flashes, is the key to high performance fixed networks.
But with demand for capacity growing at up to 36 per cent a year, operators are extracting more capacity from their existing networks by transmitting several different colours of light simultaneously. Each colour provides a single communications channel.
To date it has not been possible to switch these channels optically. The information has had to be converted from light to electricity at intermediate points, causing bottlenecks and reducing efficiency.
Marconi Communications - which incorporates the former GPT, the UK's largest telecoms manufacturer - says its new technology solves the problem with the added advantages of fault tolerance and lower costs.
The new device - called an optical multiplexer - will be commercially available in January. British Telecommunications is among the operators believed to be testing the multiplexer.
Nokia said its system, which uses new frequencies for communication between base stations, would offer network operators a tenfold increase in capacity. It would also make possible mobile phone base stations that were so small they could be sited on hoardings or bus stops.
GSM is the world standard for digital mobile phones but some operators are being forced to offer customers a less than optimal service because of capacity constraints. This will get worse as the number of subscribers grows towards an expected 1bn in 2005 from about 300m this year.
Nokia described the new system as the most important breakthrough in mobile network technology since 1991 when GSM was launched. Olli Oittinen, marketing and sales vice president at Nokia Telecommunications, said: "This is a very significant step forward using revolutionary technology."
The system, which has been under development for more than a year, is expected to be widely available from the third quarter of next year.>>>> |
