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To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (1832)	2/12/2000 5:49:00 PM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Respond to of 4808

Blinded by the Light? Check out LIGHT Reading: lightreading.com Optical Illusions Introduction: Bold Claims lightreading.com When Lucent launched its LambdaRouter last November, it described it as "the industry's first all-optical router." Guess what? It was wrong on both counts. First, the product isn't 'all-optical' at all. The LambdaRouter switches light, sure, but outgoing signals have to be regenerated electrically before they can be transmitted any distance. Second, it's not a router - in that it doesn't read layer 3 information and make decisions on how to send traffic based on the most expedient route. So if it isn't all-optical, and it isn't a router, what is it? "It's an automated patch panel," says Nicholas De Vito, director of marketing at Tellium Inc. (http://www.tellium.com/), an optical networking startup Essentially, what Lucent has built is a relatively large, 256 by 256 port, prototype optical switch using micro electro-mechanical (MEM) technology. Lucent Technologies Inc. (http://www.lucent.com) is far from alone in hyping the all-optical aspect of its developments. In fact, the way vendors market their products is becoming as important as the technology they sell. "To succeed, optical companies must know how to position their product well and enter the market in the right way," says Wu-Fu Chen, a networking entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is now funding and serving with a string of optical start-ups. Just about every vendor in the industry uses similar tactics to Lucent's in order to grab the attention of a world that's grown accustomed to thinking that all-optical is hot -- and anything else is not. Carriers are often happy to play along, announcing trials of all-optical gear to show that they're leading the charge on next generation networks. In reality, the dream of all optical networks - which promise virtually limitless bandwidth, ultra low costs and on-demand provisioning - is going to take a long time to materialize. To gain a better idea of how long, Light Reading has investigated vendors' claims and come up with a road map of the breakthroughs necessary before all optical networking becomes a reality - from the elimination of electrical regeneration, to the development of true optical crossconnects and real optical routing. Read the report sequentially, or using the following hypertext links to reach exactly the information you want: BACK TO BASICS lightreading.com LONGER TRANSMISSION DISTANCES lightreading.com OPTICAL CROSS CONNECTS lightreading.com DEBUNKING OPTICAL CLAIMS lightreading.com OPTICAL ROUTING lightreading.com PRACTICAL PROBLEMS lightreading.com NEXT UP: BACK TO BASICS lightreading.com