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Technology Stocks : Nortel Networks (NT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (6669)	9/1/2000 9:11:32 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Respond to of 14638

9/01/00 - Cisco, Nortel Battle For Switching Core Sep 01, 2000 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- DENVER -- With the introduction of its Wavelength Router this past week, Cisco Systems Inc. tossed the gauntlet to Nortel Networks Corp. in a battle for the high-speed switching core of newly installed networks. But Nortel may still hold a trump card with its yet-unproven all-optical switching scheme. Regardless of the outcome of this clash between Cisco (stock: CSCO) and Nortel (stock: NT), all players at the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) here agreed that the core of thenetwork must be a mesh, rather than a series of rings. Just outside the network core, metropolitan applications for optical transport have matured during the past two years, to the point where metro and long-haul systems are swapping some characteristics, as NFOEC made clear. The drive to push intelligence to the edge of the public network has forced edge-access systems to gain nearly as much bandwidth as core transport devices, even as they gain electronic-domain complexity in order to assign services to wavelengths. Traditionally, the fiber-optic networks that span the United States have been based on rings -- circles of fiber that can span single cities or multiple states depending on the amount of bandwidth required. Developed to handle telephone traffic, rings circumvented the problem of connecting every city to every other city: Signals could travel around the loop until hitting their destinations, and could provide backup connections simply by sending signals in the other direction. But, speaker after speaker at NFOEC asserted that the increase in data traffic has rendered rings obsolete for the network core. A ring must have the same bandwidth all around, a requirement that can prove wasteful if the ring traverses both metropolitan and rural regions. And a signal traversing the country has to touch several rings, getting converted to electricity and back into light at every juncture. More in EE Times techweb.com Copyright (C) 2000 CMP Media Inc. -0- host.insidertrader.com