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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (13947)	6/16/1999 7:51:00 PM
From: cmg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

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.