Lucent Boosts Network Speed Tenfold With
Tiny Mirrors
MURRAY HILL, N.J. (Reuters) - Lucent Technologies Inc (NYSE:LU -
news). on Tuesday said it had created a breakthrough technology using
microscopic mirrors that will allow the world's largest communications
carriers to boost the capacity of long-distance networks up to 10 times
current Internet speeds.
Lucent, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, 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.
Shares of Lucent rose 2-1/8 to 73-1/2 in composite trading on the New York
Stock Exchange.
The WaveStar LambdaRouter, as the product is known, operates at speeds
that would, in effect, allow the printed contents of whole libraries to be
transmitted in a single second. And its capacity will grow even further over
time.
Lucent said the high-capacity, all-optical router uses a series of
microscopic mirrors to instantly direct and route optical signals from fiber
to fiber in a network, without first converting them to electrical form as
must be done currently. Its speed is a function of eliminating such electrical
bottlenecks in the network.
This will save service providers up to 25 percent in operational costs -- in
part by cutting electrical power consumption by 100 times -- and enable
them to direct network traffic 16 times faster than electrical switches,
Lucent said.
''Optical wavelengths are the true building blocks of next-generation
networks, and Lucent will be the first to make all-optical networks a
reality,' Gerry Butters, president of Lucent's Optical Networking Group,
said of the latest fiber-optic networks used to transmit large volumes of
voice, data and video.
''Lucent is the first to offer a completely optical router with virtually
limitless capacity, enabling its customers to economically and
incrementally expand their networks as traffic increases,' he said.
Lucent said its 10-terabit LambdaRouter paves the way for communications
network providers to offer customers instant Internet programming and
other high-speed data and video services. It also will help these carriers
boost revenue by enabling them to sell and manage network capacity down
to the level of individual optical wavelengths, the company said.
The system will take in any voice, data or video signal, and each of the
initial 256 channels will support wavelengths at speeds up to 40 gigabits, or
billions per bits, per second -- 16 times faster than today's electrical
switches.
The first release of the WaveStar LambdaRouter will be available to select
customers in July 2000, and be made commercially available in December
2000.
In a related announcement, the company said PSINet Inc (Nasdaq:PSIX -
news). had selected Lucent's NX64000 switch/router equipment for Internet
access wholesaler's global network, making possible delivery of
dramatically increased volumes of data, voice and video traffic.
Using Lucent's switch/router, PSINet will be the first network operator to
carry high-speed data traffic at 10 gigabit per second speeds over a core
fiber optic network -- a 400 percent increase over today's standard 2.5
billion bit per second transmission rates.
The NX64000 will act as the on-ramp and off-ramp for the WaveStar
LamdaRouter, creating demand, in the form of massive volumes of data
traffic, for Lucent's high-capacity router, said Mary Ward, a Lucent
spokeswoman.
"Adding Netro Corporation's core competencies to our own makes an
unbeatable combination," said Lucent's Liparoto.
The OnDemand system employs
point-to-multipoint microwave radio links between a strategically
located hub antenna and multiple
dish antennas that are installed on the roofs or building exterior at
customer locations. The information reaches computer users through
the enterprise's regular local area network.
Lucent's OnDemand wireless broadband end-to-end network offer
incorporates the company's portfolio of data networking, optical
networking, switching and access products with the superior
performance of an integrated point-to-multipoint wireless access
system supplied under an OEM agreement with Netro Corporation,
San Jose, Calif. |
