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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (40863)	12/24/1998 9:39:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 132070

Blue, you are too kind, and sorry if I left some issues unclear. To sum it up, today's DWDMs, while extremely beneficial in that they bailed outsomeof the earlier-established fiber-based carriers like Sprint and T, who were tapped out of bandwidth on the major routes, are still early-science solutions, and thus very primitive from a number of perspectives. See the recent Scientific American article posted in the Silk Road thread. [Sidebar: Note that many of the emerging fiber barons still don't have enough traffic to push them to the wall yet, and they still have an abundant supply of unused strands in the ground, so they consequently don't need to use DWDM yet to the same extent, or for the same reasons, as the older ones. This gives them some breathing space to wait for the technology to mature. However, when they sell or lease strands to other carriers, the latter will invariably resort to maximizing their potential through the use of muxes. End Sidebar.] Two attributes stand out in my mind that make them less than optimal at this time. First, they are rush jobs, which means that their product engineering leaves something to be desired purely from a fabrication perspective. That's isn't so bad, if they work as advertised, but their dependability is also suspect in some instances, and they require the use of spare wavelengths in reserve for backups, beyond the normal ratios of working : spare. Secondly they permit the creation of so many multi-lane interstate superhighways right now that have overpasses and underpasses to get where they need to go to and from. But there are no exits along the way... at least not elegant ones, which are needed to allow for true robustness in networking. In other words, they lack an elegant means of routing discrete traffic streams between interested users in a pluralistic environment, akin to what has been achievable using the plain old telephone. Hope that cleared up some of the goggldygook for you. (smile) Have a great holiday season, Blue, and best regards, Frank C.