The following came from the Raging Bull Board, and in turn was pulled off of a Gilder News Letter, it picks up on the significance of Cao's current optical products, and gets a little confusing, as it makes a case for a switchless system, but it helps fill out the picture. Techplayer, I passed this along, for people that are not familiar with Avanex. I don't get Gilder's news letter, or attend his conferences, but at the same time, I also don't have a closed mind, about any contributions, he has made, to bring positive attention to the optical networking industry.
By: Preblast $$$
Reply To: 1538 by bmc2k $ Monday, 20 Nov 2000 at 7:22 AM EST
Post # of 1548
Why AVNX is a bigtime stock:
Make sure you make a note of this post's number, since it's a need-to-know for all AVNX (potential) investors.
See this link for the Gilder technology report:
gildertech.com
This is the important paragraph:
begin quote - Ex. Step 2) Let's focus on the 10% you would like to position in fiber technologies. The Gilder Paradigm indicates that solving the bandwidth bottleneck in the next three years is the name of the game, and the fiber beats all other technologies hands down for delivering bandwidth. Installing a national fiber network presents some daunting problems, not the least of which are time and money. To connect both coasts with fiber you will need something to keep the light signal strong over those long distances; an amplifier. It would also be great to be able to send multiple signals both ways through the same strand of fiber to increase efficiency.
Ex. Step 3) The GTR discusses two new technologies George predicts will be ascendant; Erbium Doped Amplifiers and Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). WDM allows multiple signals to be sent both ways in a single fiber strand. It would also be great to find out who the innovative companies are in putting fiber networks together. Time for Step 4.
- end quote
it just so happens that Avanex holds the key in BOTH technologies, amplifying and WDM. To illustrate this I'll quote some of Gilder's other remarks about AVNX.
This on amplifying:
bgin quote - Avanex saves the day
Does the superior efficiency of the Williams configuration dash the all-optical hopes and 80-gig dreams of the networks with 100-km spacing between huts? Not quite. Once again, Avanex saves the day. First, anyone who wants to do 40- or 80-gig channels—ultra-long-haul notwithstanding—will most likely need the Avanex dispersion compensator, called the PowerShaper. As lasers pulse on and off faster to create the more highly modulated signals, the pulses are so close together that they tend to become unreadable over even moderate distances. As its name suggests, PowerShaper reshapes the signal—that is, it “squares” and redefines the pulses—optically rather than electronically. So far, it’s the only way to produce a readable signal at super-high bitrates.
The more important application of the PowerShaper, however, is in the PowerExpress ultra-long-haul system. It combines the dispersion compensator with an optimized EDFA. Where Corvis or Qtera use Raman and FEC to eliminate the reshaping function previously performed every 400 to 600 km by electronic regenerators, the PowerShaper system obviates the Raman and the FEC and, for the first time, brings reshaping into the optical domain. And it works with 100-km spaced line amps. In fact, at 2.5 Gbps per wavelength, PowerShapers are required only every 300 km. Next year, when the 3,200 km system becomes available, in conjunction with the next generation 800 lambda PowerMux, a network could achieve 2 Tbps of ultra-long-haul light per fiber, with more than double the connectivity of any other system.
Might the “sub-optimal” 100-km spacing of other networks, in a weird twist, lead them away from Corvis and into the hands of Avanex? Might Williams’ “advantage” thus quickly be turned on its head? It depends on whether Level 3 and the others resist the temptation of speed and turn away from 40- and 80-gig systems—that is, if they open their eyes to the wider spectrum of light. - end quote
This on WDM:
begin quote - The Avanex abundance
The name Avanex will be familiar to most of you. Some of you who bought its shares in the aftermath of its $14 billion IPO may be ruing the ruinous day you learned it. But you can be assured that in those buildings, replete with some 450 animated Asian workers, you can find some of the most creative minds in all optics and the single most promising new product in the industry, the Avanex PowerMux or symmetrical multiplexer-demultiplexer.
This device performs the vital function of taking bit streams from many wavelength sources, combining these wavelengths at one end, and sending them simultaneously down a single fiber. At the other end, it takes these same wavelengths and separates them, along with their bit streams, so they can be sent to their destinations. Unlike most mux-demux devices, the Avanex processor is scalable and adaptable. It can handle virtually any bitrate, any number of wavelengths, and any spacing between wavelengths. In other words, unlike the products of its competitors, it is not restricted to a fixed set of capabilities that maximize only the gross capacity of the fiber. Instead, PowerMux maximizes the flexibility and adaptability of the network. The principle behind the PowerMux could recreate today's network, consummating the silent revolution launched by WDM, reversing the thirty year progress of packet switching, restoring the elegant luxury of circuits, but now enriched many million-fold by the power of light. - end quote
begin quote - Avanex's 800 lambdas
Once a particular spacing is set, the PowerMux is a periodic processor that automatically sets up the channels at the correct gigahertz spacing. The tighter the spacing, the more wavelengths you can fit on a fiber. At OFC Avanex demonstrated 800 channels spaced 12.5 gigahertz, or only 0.1 nanometer, apart. This was accomplished in the frequency domain. Barbarossa doubts that other companies can achieve such spacing as reliably and robustly in the nanometer domain of wavelengths. What gives Avanex a decisive edge over its rivals is its ability to cascade its PowerMuxes in a tree and branch topology. Depending on the number of devices in the hierarchy, a particular set of wavelengths can be reduced to any arbitrary mix of spacing parameters. Within the optical power budget, this capability allows a particular set of lambdas to carry a variety of bit streams. One wavelength can bear a SONET OC-192, 10 gigabit a second stream, while another wavelength on the same fiber can carry a T-1 bitstream of 1.544 megabits a second. Opening up is a vista of truly adaptable circuit switched wavelength networks.
Using a multiple set of tiny mirrors with variable refractive indices and reflectivities in a package several cubic inches in size, the PowerMux controls the interference patterns of separate light beams. Light normally takes the form of linear sine waves. When the waves exactly coincide, the interference is constructive, or additive. When the peak of one wave coincides with the trough of another, the interference is destructive, or subtractive. By manipulating the distances between the mirrors, the PowerMux controls the patterns of the emerging light beams, creating areas of constructive and destructive interference that enable the muxing and demuxing of wavelengths as desired.Better still, the PowerMux is a nonlinear interferometer-that is, it is not restricted to simple sine waves that tend to mush together (dispersion) as they flow down the fiber. Instead, the nonlinear properties of the device enable the engineer to form interference patterns that create crisp, "square" waves of light. As the word implies, "square" waves are more distinct and separate than sine waves. The bits are more readable, more robust, and more resistant to dispersion (they hold their shape longer before they mush together).
Nonlinearities are the basis also of the PowerShaper line of Avanex products that compensate for dispersion by reconstructing the "square" wave pattern at each end. Tested by AT&T (T), the Avanex PowerShaper compensated for dispersion over a 30 percent longer distance, and with a three orders of magnitude bit error rate improvement, compared to dispersion compensating fiber. - end quote
And be sure to read thsi and UNDERSTAND the impact, because if you understand, you won't be worried about AVNX stock price sagging every now and then:
begin quote - Avanex tests Corvis's limits
This new result might be termed Cao's Law, after Simon Cao of Avanex (AVNX). Cao startled the Telecosm conference with a prediction that the number of wavelength bitstreams in a single fiber thread could be increased from Corvis's (CORV) current commercial limit of 160 to the 1000 achieved in Avanex experiments, and then to an eventual level of hundreds of thousands. These predictions represent a moment in the history of optics at least as momentous as Moore's Law in microchips announced in 1965, and in Cao's vision entail the possibility of a "switchless network."
By comparison to the vision of the Avanex sage, even the moving mirrors or tiny bubbles in the best new optical switches seem as advanced and elegant as a nineteenth century railroad, embodied in a track of glass. On a railroad Cao explains, "you have one track," and for the train to go to a different place "the track must move." That is what a railroad switch is, a moving track. That's OK if you have only a few trains.
"But what if you have a lot of trains? Maybe you can build a big switchyard. Maybe you can switch a hundred trains. Maybe a thousand trains. But what if you have a million trains?"
AVANEX WILL RULE THE WORLD OF WDM BECAUSE IT USES THE ENTIRE PANOPLY OF LIGHT
Simon is not ready, this day, to announce a million lambdas on a fiber. But more than 1000 WDM lambdas on a fiber adds up to close to a million lambdas on an 864-fiber cable. Moreover, in the lab Avanex has modulated the sidebands of a single lambda channel with 100 different RF subchannels, in effect creating a hundred thousand optical carriers of roughly 120 Mbps on a fiber. Trouble at the train yard. Hundreds of thousands of lambdas in a fiber or tens of millions in a fiber cable cannot be switched like trains.
Even the hope of muxing large "trains" of lambdas together across the switch is dashed by new research from Corning (GLW). Eighty percent of data may be "through traffic," not being dropped or added at the node. But the "through" lambdas are scattered through the fibers. Thus, all the WDM signals must be demuxed and switched individually, with through lambdas moved onto "through" fibers. As a result of their research, Corning's own novel switching architecture—based on a sixteen-fiber network with forty lambdas per fiber—calls for 640 cross-connections, one for each lambda. Light all 144 fibers in a Williams long haul cable, however, with current state of the art 160 channels, and that makes 23,040 cross points. At 100,000 channels per fiber that would be…Oh, never mind.
Simon, however, would say that the ultimate objection to optical switches is not the accumulation of problems but the missed opportunity. Why create the flexibility of 100,000 lambdas in a fiber and then not use it at the switch point, which is just where you want it? Why invent the automobile, as it were, and build multi-lane highways for it, all to rope thousands of cars together and impel them along the highway like a train. "Cars cannot work the way trains work. We cannot have thousands or millions of cars on the highway if the highway must move when a car wants to switch lanes or exit. The car moves, not the highway. On a railroad the track steers the train, but on a highway the car steers itself. That is why people like cars, they go where you say. The highway is a network without switches. We have exit ramps or intersections, but no switches. - end quote |
