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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (5971)	11/22/1999 10:35:00 AM
From: Techplayer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

elmatador, In the following article, it states that within a year, LU will deliver a $100 optical card for a PC which certainly supports my bet on optical to the home within a couple of years (I buried a conduit for the 1100 feet from the street to my house to provide access to the dark fiber in my town). Brian Forbes, 11/29 HOOKED ON PHOTONICS There's a tetonic shift that has begun shaking the telecommunications industry: the move to optical networking, the hottest new market in high-tech. The competition is accelerating. Lucent acquired Ascend and Nexabit. Cisco agreed to buy Cerent and Monterey Networks, despite underwhelming sales. Ciena made two optical acquisitions. Fueling this frenzy are a building boom in fiber-optic lines and soaring demand for bandwidth. Fiber-optic backbones now serve mainly as cross-country thruways because it was too expensive to deploy all the computers needed to serve small local markets; the shift to optics could let fiber networks extend farther into neighborhoods than ever before. Venture firms and Wall Street have been quick to jump on the optical bandwidth wagon. Employee raids are heating up, too. Nortel slammed Optical Networks, in which Cisco holds a stake, with a suit alleging that in luring away 19 engineers, the new firm seeks to steal its secrets. In the mid-1990s Ciena, Lucent and Nortel introduced boxes that vastly increased the volume of data a fiber can carry. Since then, such wave division multiplexers have steadily increased the number of wavelengths per fiber the capacity carried on each. Lucent, Nortel and Ciena have debuted "metro" products that will bring optical networking to local markets. Lucent has launched 14 optical products for local markets. It is pushing businesses to string fiber directly into their offices. Only 5 percent have it today. Lucent even expects to sell a $100 optical card within a year that enables PCs to hook directly into fiber networks. All-optical networks are a long way off. All-optical routers may not be widely available for years. This month Lucent is taking the wraps off a fully optical router, though it won't be ready until next July. A huge payoff is in store for companies that nudge the all-optical network closer -- and for the investors who bet on the winners