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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HammerHead who wrote (16484)	9/30/2000 5:30:58 PM
From: HammerHead	Respond to of 21876

(award) excerpts from Discover magazine: COMMUNICATIONS WINNER: Photons Unleashed Innovator: Randy Giles, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, New Jersey Innovation: The WaveStar LambdaRouter Log onto the Internet, and you wait. We all do, even those lucky dogs with the blindingly fast DSLs. Sometimes, traffic just snarls, and you may as well step out for a cup of joe while the screen loads. Such gridlock is often unavoidable, because somewhere in the vast data network beyond your screen, light particles called photons, which whiz through fiber-optic cables at the speed of light, are forced to slam on the brakes at an intersection - what fiber-optics technicians call a "cross-connect" - in order to make a ridiculous transformation from photon to electron, leaving the world of light for the antiquated world of electric signals. Imagine coming to a screeching halt at a stoplight in a Ferrari that morphs into a Dodge Dart when you hit the accelerator again. Get ready to travel the highways and byways of the Internet on cruise control beginning this December, when the nation's phone companies will be able to buy and install an all-optical switch that lets photons be photons. The LambdaRouter, designed by Randy Giles, 45, and his colleagues at Lucent, allows light to sail down one fiber-optic cable, roar into a cross-connect, where it bounces from one set of gold-plated mirrors to another, and then ricochets onto a fiber waiting on the other side of the switch. Because the router can ferry so much more traffic than can be conveyed by a conventional electrical switch, it will mean cheaper and faster phone and Internet connections. "There will be no more bottlenecks stopping you from getting to your favorite Web site," Giles promises. "The worldwide wait will be eliminated."