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Technology Stocks : Frank Coluccio Technology Forum - ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (594)	12/2/1999 10:42:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1782

Ken, Yes, it's far more likely that mapping IP directly onto glass or lambda will take place first where fiber can be accessed by the user, or their local service contractor/integrator, directly. And those situations are LANs, MANs and campus area networks (CANs). There is still considerable debate and conjecture as to how "thick" the upper regions of Layer 1 and the lower regions of Layer 2 need to be, and some have questioned the need for these, entirely. One should keep in mind the attributes that are lost and the tradeoffs involved, however, when considering the elimination of these layers. See my preceding post where I identified some of those attributes in terms of "baggage." IMO, however, at some point the convergence of packets onto media needs to take place, which means timing, framing, mapping within frames, etc., and that's what the whole idea is behind the OSI Reference Model (or its assumed heir's) layering functions. At the lowest level, it's about media convergence, or imparting information onto the pipe. And this can be done only when you have direct access to the actual fiber, and this is likely to be prevalent only in LANs/CANs/MANs, for a while. We may begin to see exceptions to this if lambdas are opened up in the WAN, as in WCG's, and perhaps MFNX's, offerings which they will do on a fiber swap arragnement, but these are likely to be made available only to service providers and only the largest of enterprises, at first. And their reach will be narrowly defined, since only specific routes will have this capability in the early going. I would also be looking to LVLT and others among the fiber baron group to begin offering such types of channels in the future, but I wouldn't bet on these players making lambda services available for general consumption anytime soon. Regards, Frank Coluccio