RE: Time to optically switch circuit.
Hundreds of times a second sounds great to me. In my previous job, we ran T3 muxes and with lots of channels, electronically breaking down and building circuits for reroutes, etc. It would take about 2 to 10 seconds to move all the channels (upto 200 channels on each T3) from one T-3 route to another. Granted this was electronic, but still, 100xsec sounds very fast to me, electronic or optical. As long as you set the timeout timers on the terminal ends (PBXs, servers, PCs, whatever) high enough (we used 15 seconds), each channel's traffic will pick up where it left off without reestablishing sessions. From the enduser viewpoint, the session 'hangs' for a few seconds or the phone conversation sounds 'dead', then it works fine and continues whereever they are at when the reroute occurred. Of course, the impatient users hit ctl/alt/del after 3 seconds! or hang up the phone. :-)
Buck |
