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Technology Stocks : Silkroad -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (21)	11/15/1998 8:38:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 626

>>How many amplitudes can dance on the head of a wave?<< History time. When DDS, T's long-awaited digital data service, first hit the central offices and the interstate routes back in the mid seventies, (7/76) they promoted it as a purely digital offering, implying that users for the first time would realize the benefits of binary transport. It wasn't all smoke and mirros, but some fire alarms did go off in my head at the time. In the local loops, some variants of DDS were indeed "purely" digital, whatever that really is is up for debate, since all digital signals borrow from and are subject to analog phenomena. But the local loops at least used a baseband approach that used bipolar formats. In the long haul, however, and in the microwave and some rural areas that were stiall using vacuum tube analog system technology, they were actually using Farinon Modems on coaxial routes, using quadrature amplitude modulation and phase shift keying, passing these off as digital, as well. And as far as the user was concerned, it was... because their local interfaces were now digital customer service units (CSUs) instead of analog modems. How many amplitudes do you suppose danced on the head of a coaxial center conductor to achieve 274 Mb/s at the time? At the time, that was primarily cupric coax, whereas we're talking about silica here. I think that the cdma specimen will shine more light on this approach, as Templex's story begins to unflold... assuming that there is a story there to unfold. Which brings another question to the fore here, and that is how many "baseband" digital signals do you suppose Silkroad is proposing that it is using on its single lambda? One? Multiple? And they indicate that they are tagging flows, sounds familiar. Cisco's tag switching, the IETF's proposed MPLS or multi protocol label switching, etc. Another of the startup DWDMers is suggesting something similar with their product, and that is to apply "bar code-" like labels to very large flows as a means of identifying and funneling them at the terminuses of long haul routes, much like frame relay's use of local addressing schemes between end office nodes and subscribers. Who is that startup? Anyone know? I think it was Cambrian, but I'm not certain.