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To: D. Newberry who wrote (25242)	5/23/2000 11:34:00 PM
From: kumar	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

<<you must convert to electronics>> Didnt Agilent come out with a optical switch that overcomes this hurdle ? EDIT : just found the URL for the Press Release : agilent.com cheers, kumar

To: D. Newberry who wrote (25242)	5/23/2000 11:40:00 PM
From: RoseCampion	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 54805

OTOTOT The reason is simple -- photons travel through glass much more quickly than electrons travel through wire. I'll muddy the picture even more. If I remember my solid-state physics primer correctly (and you have no guarantees on this score, being that quite a number of years have passed), electrons themselves pass through a copper wire very, very slowly - on the order of feet per minute or some multiple thereof. It's the electromagnetic wave that travels through the copper wire at near light-speed or a goodly fraction of same. (Analogy is when you turn on a garden hose: you'll get an immediate spurt of water out the business end, even though it will be quite a while before the first cold water from the tap will actually transit the entire hose to come out the nozzle). So the author is technically correct about the relative speed of photons vs. electrons, but of course (as everyone else has already pointed out) that's completely irrelevant to the bandwidth issue at hand. I believe that optical fiber comes out far on top because light is at a much higher frequency (=higher Shannon limit); you also can do fun stuff like 192-channel DWDM which would be impossible in a copper wire because fiber's interference and attenuation characteristics permit such things while copper doesn't. Someone with a real engineering background can probably explain this more accurately. -Rose-