y Om Malik
ow far can you make a laser beam
travel? Eduardo Shoval and Yochay
(Joe) Danziger, the cofounders of
Richardson, Tex.-based optical
networking startup Lasercomm Inc., think
they can make them travel very far. They're
staking their future on it.
Originally from Tel Aviv, the two believe that
by using a technology called "spatial mode
transformation" (SMT), developed by their
year-and-a-half-old company, they can make
a beam of light travel farther without losing
any quality through controlled environments
such as a telephone company's fiber optic
network. In order to achieve this, the Israeli
entrepreneurs have come up with what they
call a "dispersion management device" (DMD),
which connects to a network and is based on
SMT.
This single fiber is capable
of transmitting billions of
bits per second without
much quality loss.
While it is unlikely that this device is ever
going to show up in your computer or on your
cable system, DMD could become a godsend
for Global Crossing (nasdaq: GBLX), Qwest
Communications (nasdaq: QWST), Level 3
Communications (nasdaq: LVLT) or any other
company that is building fiber optic networks
to carry voice, video and data traffic.
These companies have started to deploy a
new kind of transmission technology called
"wavelength division multiplexing" (WDM),
which allows them to increase the speed and
capacity of transmission--be it voice, data or
video--utilizing their existing fiber optic
communications networks. With WDM,
multiple frequencies are transmitted
simultaneously over a single optical fiber.
For example, a fiber optic network carrying
2.5 Gbps can be made to carry 16 times that
amount, or about 40 Gbps, with the aid of
WDM technology. The market for such
enabling hardware will increase from 1998
sales of $1.6 billion to $4.4 billion by the year
2001, according to San Francisco-based
research company Ryan Hankin Kent.
Shoval and Danziger's quest began with a
basic fiber optic network, which uses a thin
glass wire designed specifically for light
transmission. Data travel through the core of
this fiber, which is made of pure silicon
dioxide (SiO2). This single fiber is capable of
transmitting billions of bits per second
without much quality loss, unlike traditional
copper line-based networks, which have
limited capacity and experience quality drops.
These light-based signals run over a single
strand of fiber (single mode) at data transfer
rates of 2.5 Gbps or slower. Under these
conditions, the signals experience little or no
quality loss. However, if you increase the
number of fiber strands or the speeds of the
data transmission to, say, 10 Gbps, the
signals start to degrade and experience
quality loss. This is where Lasercomm's DMD
device comes into play.
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