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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Gilder who wrote (6974)	3/23/2004 11:16:23 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Hi George, Good to see you. I had a notion that you might make a contribution here;) What you say might seem far out, outlandish even, to anyone who doesn't see these issues from an intuitive (or even a learned) perspective. I can gauge the leap you're projecting as being akin to the leap that has occurred between your Fibersphere article, which you wrote in the December '92 Forbes ASAP, and the present: A dozen years. Interestingly, it took the Bell System over twenty years to morph its FDM Coaxial L systems to a digital mode through the implementation of T systems and the North American Digital Hierarchy. I can recall reading the Bell Labs Record in 1968-9 projecting this NADH scheme, and my fellow workers at the time thinking that it was good press but that it would never fly. They also made that call about PicturePhone, but they were right about that one! ;) Despite how much we take WDM for granted today, it's been a long, slow process in the making, so slow in fact, that it has progressed to this point in an almost unnoticeable way. The place where I can use some help is in envisaging a road map showing how we get there, as you've described in message # 6974. Would you --or anyone else looking in-- care to describe in general terms how we get to the point of emancipation that you speak of from here? Or, conversely, why we won't get there in quite the terms that you've elaborated, and why? John C. and Peter E, thank you for your previous comments. I'd also like to hear your comments on George's reply, since you've already commented on the original article. And all others who have an opinion to air on this topic, please feel free to jump in, as well. TIA. FAC frank@fttx.org

To: George Gilder who wrote (6974)	3/23/2004 11:48:22 PM
From: Peter Ecclesine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

Hi George, The ultimate emancipation is the peer-to-peer all wireless network, which is agnostic to control. The all wireless network is intrinsically personal and routed at every radio. It uses all frequencies legally available (e.g. 3.1-10.6 GHz) on a where and when basis. Any circuit system will be so drastically impersonal that it will succumb to wireless. petere

To: George Gilder who wrote (6974)	3/24/2004 12:41:37 AM
From: ftth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

re: "The ultimate emancipation is the all optical network, which is agnostic to protocol, bitrate, content, and control plane." I trust you don't believe "ultimate emancipation" is a term in the RBOC or cable MSO vocabulary. The attributes of said nirvana (bitrate, protocol, content, control plane agnostic)also rub their core operational beliefs the wrong way. So this must mean you are an advocate of municipal networks and other non-legacy access network beach heads? It doesn't matter what the rest of the network does if the access network retains its present DNA. That is the emancipation of most concern. re:"The all optical network is intrinsically circuit switched from the edge. It uses the [wavelength] both to define the route and to bear the message. ..up to some 10K lambdas on a fiber." Your words imply dedicated, reserved, end-to-end wavelengths. There are a heck of a lot more than 10,000 simultaneous sessions in medium to large aggregation points in the network, growing as you approach the core. A thousand fibers carrying the same 10,000 wavelengths fundamentally does not scale by this approach. Each wavelength is a circuit by your definition, and no matter how many 10,000-lambda fibers you have, there are only 10,000 unique circuits across them all. There has to be a switching granularity finer than a circuit. It has to be able to dynamically switch wavelengths in-flight, to get around the wavelength contention problem during the route, while still maintaining both the source and destination wavelength information in a header somewhere, since those are final route identifiers by your definition.