Now that you brought it up, you need to follow up on it. I am sure there are VC's in the Bay Area just dying to fund this project.
I'm sure there are ... but I'm not aware of anyone really having a glimmer of how to do it yet, which makes for a rather weak business plan (not that this has always stopped VCs). My sense is that we are a good two steps off, i.e., we have not yet gotten close enough to even know what the right directions are going to be, but are only close enough to have a couple of things that are vaguely suggestive.
In fact, I got to thinking this morning whether it might turn out that this holy grail might not be as significant as it seems. If one thinks in terms of optical replacing electrical, then one thinks in terms of wanting to be able to do in an optical environment what one can do in the electrical, hence the grail. But, what if it turns out that introducing that layer of processing, even supposing it becomes possible, actually just got in the way of optical doing what it does best, i.e., really moving data, and that the optimum strategy consisted of picking the optimum available optical pipe externally, while still in the electrical part of the network, even if that meant a little extra routing at one end or the other. Just a thought. |
