Wednesday November 10 3:08 AM ET
Lucent Boosts Network Speed Tenfold
With Tiny Mirrors
MURRAY HILL, N.J. (Reuters) - Lucent Technologies Inc (NYSE:LU -
news). said Tuesday 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. |
