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To: Roland Ebringer who wrote (36998)	12/25/2000 11:59:55 PM
From: tinkershaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I think the point that Judith was trying to make was that the information for the MEMS device to know when it should zig and when it should zag has to be an electrical signal. This may be true. I am not a MEMS expert and just learning this technology as we speak. It is way pre-chasm. However, what the ultimate switching situation is, is the optical reading of frequency, purely in the optical form. That is if the frequency is A, then it is circuit switched (not packet switched) to 0, and if the frequency is B then it is circuit switched to 1, and the light routed accordingly. What is holding this back? The DWDM capacity of optical cables today. Corvis has demonstrated 160 channels on Fiber, AVNX will be doing 360 easy on a commercial basis for the next generation of networks (the OC-760 or thereabouts) and has done 1000 channels in the lab. What AVNX is promising, and this is what Gilder has picked up on like a dog with her Christmas side of beef (lets just say my dog got a good little surprise from Sanat), is that AVNX will be able to (using optics equivalent to Moore's Law (Cao's Law) - at which time is proceeding about 2x+ the pace that Moore's Law operated at (18 months to double vs. 6-9 months under Cao's Law) 100,000s of channels onto each strand of fiber. With such capacity, you do not need to switch by packet or do any electrical conversion (at least not at the core anyways). What you do instead is shoot out tunable bands of laser and have optical sensors read the frequency and the light is routed accordingly. It is a far simpler, far more elegant, and far cheaper approach. This is also the ultimate discontinuity in the network. Theoretically it is so much cheaper to build and operate than the current packet switched network (because you require 1/100th as many lasers, hardly any switches or routers, at least at the core, and can make so much better capacity use of existing and future fiber than can be done today) that its adoption is as inevitable as the adoption of CDMA vs. TDMA should bandwidth demands not peak out in the near future (and most of us predict anyways that the demand for bandwidth will continue to skyrocket). So you get rid of the electrical conversion process when you are able to put more channels per thread. With these number of channels per thread of fiber you can move very cost-effectively to a much higher capacity and cheaper to build and operate circuit switched, all optical network without need of core routers, electrical switches, etc. Until then, Judith is most probably correct. I know the switching is done optically, but there probably is a need to read the content of the light first on these MEMS devices. Tinker