Thanks to Dave Horne from the Last Mile thread.
Message 11482175
"Algety Telecom, based in Lannion, France, has received first round funding of 4.4m euros ($4.7m) from
US and European venture capitalists, including Banexi Venture Partners, Crescendo Ventures, Newbury
Ventures and Technocom Ventures. It has also received 2.7m euros ($2.9m) from French government
sources, including Agence National de L'Innovation (ANVAR).
So far the funding has paid for Algety's exclusive acquisition of all technology rights and patents
connected to the soliton transmission that the company's founders were instrumental in developing at
CNET. It has also seen Algety recruit a staff of 25, including a team of software engineers which is now
working to produce the first commercial soliton transmission system in time for launch in mid-2000,
said Jerome Faul, Algety's managing director.
Soliton technology threatens to be the next big thing in optical transmission systems, and promises to
both boost the capacity of today's dense wave division multiplexed (DWDM) backbone networks and,
critically, cut their construction and maintenance costs by reducing the need for signal amplification and
regeneration. In a regular commercial fiber network, claims Faul, operators typically require to amplify
optical signals every 50km to 100km, and to completely regenerate the signal (refreshing the traffic by
converting it from optical, to electronic and back) at distances of 400km or less.
Algety's technology means amplification is only needed after each 100km. But it is its ability to stretch a
terabit per second signal to 1,000km which will be the market differentiator says Faul. So far,
prospective rivals, such as Lucent, have said they can extend unregenerated DWDM transmission to
400km. But over a 1,000km link, this would still require regeneration plants costing millions of dollars
in three locations, at 200km, 600km and 1,000km, Faul argues. "We only need to regenerate once. So
we can reduce the costs by a factor of three," he said.
The company plans to jealously guard its soliton technology, which uses very short, but very stable
bursts of lightwaves to carry data. There are no plans to license the technology to other vendors."
and, "In 1998 Pirelli participated in the first field trial of a commercial Soliton transmission product. The field
trial involved a four-wavelength system and demonstrated doubled transmission length when compared
with the already installed OC-192 NRZ systems"
And..."Global Telephony, Oct 1998 pNA
Author
Shaw, Russell
Full Text
By tripling the distance that data, voice and video traffic can be sent over a fiber optic cable, MCI
Communications Corp. believes its new soliton-based technology will increase the efficiency of its
telephone network, while helping it save money on its planned network capital budget.
"Solitons offer the prospect of lowering transmission costs," says Niall Robinson, senior engineer for MCI
Engineering. "In return, this will reduce the cost of providing network capacity to our customers."
Hope that helps. It looks to me like a decent improvement may be in store, at the least.
I also know of a company which claims to have a "soliton theory" based technology for twisted pair copper wires, which they claim to have demonstrated over three miles at 51.2mbps, a speed they hope to soon double to 102mbps. They also indicate they will commence with coast to coast tests soon, and will use recently received financing to commence proving their technology to the industry as soon as possible.
They indicate they believe their's is a superior technology to what's being contempletated elsewhere in the industry(XDSL?). Unfortunately, they have provided no substantiation of their technology to date so far as I know. I haven't found any reference to anything quite like this anywhere, and hence, without any technical information from the company for others to evaluate so that I may have a clue(VBG), I find this particular possibility to be thoroughly un-quantifiable at the moment. This would be a company called Astounding.com., said to soon(any day now- but weeks late as it now stands) become a part of New Visual Entertainment(NVXE), a bulletin board stock involved in 3-d technologies. This sounds far fetched to me, to say the least, but bless the underdogs, and George Gilder too(one of them?).
Dan B |
