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To: jack bittner who wrote (93116)	11/28/1999 11:12:00 PM
From: Jeff Fox	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Jack, re"photons: light waves through the air" Thanks for your post. - Although intriguing, "unguided" light has fundamental problems. Fog, for instance, does a number on light beams. It requires a clear, continuous line of sight, not good for snaking through walls. In close quarters it is hard to create separate channels. The idea has been around for thirty years solving very special case problems. The real, astounding progress with light is with fibre transmission. Visit the Lucent site to read about real progress toward a terrabit per second on single fibres. Wow! It is clear that fibre will provide us with unlimited backbone bandwidth if we can only get it to where its needed. My guess is that wideband will come "the last mile" via cable modem and ADSL twisted pair, whichever works best for a particular location, simply because that is what now exist. I haven't yet read about a single deployment of fibre in the last mile infrastucture. The head end of these will be rather local concentrators which will eventually be serviced by fibre back to the older CO's. John and I have the common problem of being out of reach of these boxes; at least for this first deployment of wideband. I hope this gets fixed real soon! Jeff