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Technology Stocks : JDS Uniphase (JDSU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David C. Burns who wrote (10799)	6/7/2000 7:15:00 AM
From: Glenn McDougall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24042

Fibre-optics 'still in infancy,' Straus says Pace driven by bandwidth demand Kristin Goff The Ottawa Citizen WASHINGTON, D.C. --The explosive growth of fibre-optics is only in its very early stages of helping to transform the Internet into a revolutionary force, says Jozef Straus, president of JDS Uniphase. "Fibre-optics is still in its infancy" and the technology to move increasing amounts of data along the Internet is moving at incredible speed, Mr. Straus said yesterday at Globe-Tech, a joint Canadian and Washington D.C. technology conference. Fibre-optics technology is already cutting transmission costs along the Internet backbone by half and doubling its capacity every six to nine months, said Mr. Straus, whose company is the world's biggest maker of fibre-optics components. That pace of growth isn't likely to slow in the near future as Internet users push for faster, cheaper and more volumes of information on networks, which in turn are driving exponential demand for increased and faster bandwidth. Mr. Straus predicted a bandwidth "explosion over the next five to 10 years." Demand for videos or movies, for example, which require the transmission of large amounts of data and are slow to download on most computers, will be a major driver in expanding network transmission abilities. And, as costs go down, new opportunities for linking information users will fuel the market further. That is just one example of what is driving the need for increased speed on both long distance and local transmissions. "I think we need at least many, many thousands times more bandwidth because we also know that when costs go down, new opportunities arise," Mr. Straus said. JDS Uniphase is already riding a wave of such demand from Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies and other telecommunication companies for their fibre-optic gear that moves Internet traffic. JDS Fitel, the predecessor company Mr. Straus co-founded in Ottawa about a decade ago, pioneered ways to speed more traffic down the networks with technologies such as dense wavelength multiplexing, which is able to send signals at multiple wavelengths through a single strand of optical fibre. That greatly expands the capacity of the telecommunications infrastructure. Since its merger with California-based Uniphase, the company has developed modules, including various capacity and speed enhancers, that have enabled its customers to cut down the time for deploying new transmission systems from three or four months to two weeks. In comments to a reporter, Mr. Straus said he was pleased with the company's operations in Ottawa, which have grown from less than 500 employees in 1996 to 8,500 workers. But he declined to say what the affect the continuing growth in fibre optics might mean to the company's growth plans over the next few years.