I also believe they're looking at similar initiatives as that of Silkroads technology.
Speaking of SilkRoad, here are a couple recent articles from the San Diego Union-Tribune:
<<<<<
OPTIC HOT SHOT | 'Star Wars' whiz turns his attention to giving more oomph to high-speed electronic transmissions
Mike Drummond
STAFF WRITER
12-Jan-1999 Tuesday
James Palmer | SilkRoad Inc.
During the Cold War -- when East and West confronted each other with a strategy known as "mutually assured destruction" -- James Palmer was in a lab, working on a way to stop a nuclear missile attack.
He and his fellow anti-rocket scientists were among an elite brain trust
behind America's Strategic Defense Initiative, the ill-fated "Star Wars"
project of the 1980s intended to laser-zap incoming ballistic missiles.
Palmer, with a fondness for snakeskin cowboy boots and unfiltered Camel cigarettes, was well suited to the task.
But when the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989, Palmer's work crashed with it. Euphoria had replaced paranoia, and for a brief moment, peace had broken out. "Star Wars," the missile-defense initiative, was dead.
Red-lined out of the Department of Defense budget, Palmer returned to academia and obscurity, where he might have remained had it not been for some intriguing ideas scrawled on buffet napkins and a couple of eager San Diego entrepreneurs.
Today, the iconoclast scientist who once worked to blast ICBMs from the heavens is working to explode bandwidth. His mission: boost the amount of electronic information -- the lifeblood of modern business -- that can be shot through fiber optic wires.
Palmer, 62, is the co-founder, chairman, chief technology officer and
supreme intellectual property of SilkRoad, a start-up in Sorrento Valley
that created headlines, and plenty of skepticism, when it unveiled its
technology in November.
During the controlled demonstration, more than 100 television screens
flickered to life as SilkRoad pumped 93 billion bits of information a
second -- the equivalent of 77,500 copies of "Moby Dick" -- through a
single wavelength of fiber-optic line. That's more than double what today's best networks can do.
SilkRoad, with 75 employees, says it will be able to send 10 trillion bits
of information a second, the maximum carrying capacity of fiber lines.
Critics, unsettled by the company's refusal to disclose names of investors or reference clients, wondered if privately held SilkRoad will be able to transport its technology out of the lab and into the real world early this year, as advertised.
So far, the company has only announced deals with San Diego State
University and Six R Communications in Monroe, N.C.
"If (SilkRoad's technology) will do what they say it will do, it will
change the nature of the business," says Jeff Kagan of Kagan Telecom Associates in Atlanta. "It's impressive as hell, but it has to prove itself."
Others were put off by SilkRoad's ostentatious coming out, when the company -- with the careful orchestration of public-relations powerhouse Burson-Marsteller -- invited financial managers, media and industry researchers to a techno-demo in the very heart of Wall Street.
The SilkRoad show fueled speculation that the company was trawling for venture capital or poised for a public offering. But company officials
demured when asked about their financial needs. The mixed signals concerned some.
"This company has too much money for a start-up," says Virginia Brooks, vice president of networking and telecommunications at Aberdeen Group in Boston. "This is the only company that has ever paid for me to come see a demo.
"I distrust demos," Brooks says. "You don't know what's behind the
curtain."
Those who know Palmer have no such qualms.
"Some of his physics is so leading edge, it's beyond my level of
comprehension," says one colleague, who works for a rival company and didn't want his name printed. "In time, his will be viewed as landmark work."
Robert Freeman, SilkRoad's vice president of operations, says Palmer is "probably an eyelash shy of a mathematics savant" and is destined for a Nobel prize.
That kind of talk makes the 6-foot, 2-inch lab rat blush.
"Somehow, I just don't see that my work reaches that kind of goal," says Palmer. "My horizons of ignorance expand every day."
Strange talk from a man who solves equations that meander on for 12 pages and has authored three books, including "Transient Heat Transfer in Flat Plates," an excruciatingly technical tome some four inches thick.
SilkRoad's technology, called Refractive Synchronization Communication, involves sending multiple pieces of information along a single wavelength of light, based on the Einsteinian premise that photons or units of light can coexist in the same place at the same time.
Conventional networks are more linear in design and send data on separate, multiple wave lengths.
SilkRoad contends its solution is cheaper because it doesn't need the types of amplifiers, routers and all the attendant supporting software used in today's networks.
"The reason we find their story so interesting is that if they can do
something efficiently that costs less, then why wouldn't
(telecommunications) carriers want it?" asks Maribel Lopez, an analyst at Forrester Research in Massachusetts.
The increases in speed and carrying capacity will enable true two-way
interaction over the Internet, says SilkRoad, and will benefit such
applications as streaming audio and video, as well as three-dimensional and holographic imaging.
"One day, there won't even be a (television)," says SilkRoad's Freeman. "You'll be able to see "Monday Night Football" players running around on your living room floor, just like a "Star Trek" holodeck.
SilkRoad's bandwidth solution is derivative of Palmer's work on the Star Wars anti-missile initiative.
The U.S. government wanted to ricochet laser beams off orbiting mirrors to shield the nation from thermonuclear holocaust. But in tests, the lasers kept blowing up the mirrors.
It was Palmer, with his spelunker's gift for exploring deep mathematical
equations, who helped solve the problem of exploding mirrors and took the trillion dollar anti-missile defense fantasy closer to reality -- until the
government scrapped the program.
Nearly a decade after the demise of the Star Wars initiative, the specter of rogue nations such as North Korea launching missiles at the United States has generated talk about exhuming the strategic defense initiative, or elements of it.
Palmer is not interested.
"Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and coffee cup," Palmer says. "I know they are using some of my previous work; they are using my text. That's all I care to know about. I'm happy to know they're using my book. I'm just glad they're not using me."
His previous work with lasers, light waves and optics earned Palmer honors and awards, including the Rudolf Kingslake Medal and Prize awarded by the International Society of Optical Engineering.
Although Palmer kept his head inside the cloistered world of academia after Star Wars, he did make forays into the private sector. He was a staff consultant at TRW. And he considered taking a similar position at
now-defunct InLight Communications, a Carlsbad company that worked to boost the capacity of TV cable transmissions.
InLight founders Kevin Doria and Jonathan Thomas sought out Palmer for his expertise, but Palmer walked away from the company to work as a department head at the Career College of Northern Nevada in Reno.
"I had severe technical arguments with their approach," Palmer says of InLight. "But we stayed in touch."
Indeed, after InLight faded in 1996, Doria and Thomas charted a course with an Internet company called Syncomm, but the fledgling company quickly ran into problems with limited bandwidth.
Doria dispatched Freeman to talk with Palmer at a buffet restaurant in
Reno. It was there Palmer scrawled his ideas on a collection of napkins. Doria and Thomas, who is no longer with the company, thought they could bring Palmer's ideas to commercial fruition.
Syncomm morphed into SilkRoad, a name derived from Marco Polo's
explorations to the Orient. The scribblings on the buffet napkins became the basis for SilkRoad's technology and are now locked in a company safe.
"This is not an insignificant discovery," Freeman says of Palmer's ideas.
SilkRoad's technology will have to prove itself against emerging standard Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or DWDM, systems from Ciena and Northern Telecom, as well as cutting-edge technology from Lucent Technologies.
Moreover, SilkRoad's obscurity has other researchers wondering: Who are these people? Palmer and SilkRoad, for instance, were no-shows at last year's Optical Fiber Communications conference in San Jose.
"People don't know anything about these guys," says Brooks of the Aberdeen Group. "There's something slimy about them. And if (Palmer's) this brilliant, then what's he doing at Northern Nevada?"
Palmer says he gets to pursue his love affair with science and increasing bandwidth using the physics of light -- a pursuit he said is every bit as demanding as Star Wars and more fun than working inside the bureaucratic confines of academia.
"I'm working on things that are 100 times more advanced," he said in a voice rasped from cigarettes. "I just keep my head in the laboratory and keep on trucking."
SilkRoad at a glance
What: Makes high-speed fiber-optic network technology
Founded: By Jonathan Thomas, Kevin Doria and Dr. James Palmer as Syncomm on Nov. 21, 1996. Recently renamed SilkRoad after Marco Polo's trade route to the Orient.
<<<<<
<<<<
SilkRoad looking for riches on light-speed ques
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Drummond
SPECIAL TO THE UNION-TRIBUNE | The New York Times contributed to this report.
04-Nov-1998 Wednesday
A San Diego start-up firm says it has developed new technology to radically increase the amount of information that can be pumped through fiber-optic cables, a feat that could drive down the cost of long-distance calls and move data over the Internet at light speed.
SilkRoad Inc., formerly known as Syncomm, unveiled its new technology yesterday at a demonstration in New York City. During the demo, the company fed about 93 billion bits of information -- the equivalent of 77,500 copies of "Moby Dick" -- through a fiber-optic line in one second. And company officials said they're capable of flooding about 6 trillion bits of data through a single wavelength of cable.
The technology is expected to hit the market during the first quarter of
1999.
Existing state-of-the-art networks feed up to 40 billion bits of data a
second, at best, and the new discovery could pave a path to riches for closely held SilkRoad.
Some analysts, however, remain skeptical of the development. They pointed out yesterday that super-speed fiber technology would not find its way to homes and small businesses anytime soon.
The sort of speeds being discussed by SilkRoad "may be possible in the lab, but I don't think any network now is anywhere near that," said Robert Rosenberg, president of Parsippany, N.J.-based Insight Research Corp.
Still, large corporate enterprises and major telecommunications companies, which control the nation's communication central nervous system, could be early adopters of the technology. And the explosion of more bandwidth -- a term used to express a system's data-carrying capacity -- could mean lower prices for consumers.
"This could drive the price of a minute of long distance to under a penny," said Insight's Rosenberg. "It's great news if (SilkRoad) can really make it work."
SilkRoad must persuade telecommunications titans such as AT&T Corp., Sprint, MCI-Worldcom or others to adopt its nascent technology over emerging and established fiber-optic standards, such as wave division multiplexing, which uses lasers to send and receive messages over different colors of light.
SilkRoad's drive for market adoption is complicated by the fact that major telecommunication firms and competing start-ups also are developing ways to boost bandwidth using existing technology. Lucent Technologies, for instance, is working to deploy high-speed networking for AT&T that Lucent said would carry 400 billion bits a second over fiber-optic cables.
SilkRoad must "get a reference client," said Insight's Rosenberg. "So far as I know, they haven't sold it to anybody."
The company's technology boosts the performance of existing fiber cables. The company said it has learned to embed information on a single laser beam, and that unlike competitors, it can send massive amounts of data over long distances without having to either repeat or amplify the signal along the way. SilkRoad received a patent on the process last month and has applied for other patents.
"We've made a discovery that will be looked back on as an important
milestone," said Kevin C. Doria, SilkRoad's president and chief executive.
The company was founded by James Palmer, a chemist the company identifies as the former chief optical scientist for the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." Doria said San Diego State University has agreed to jointly research deployment of the new technology for distance-learning programs.
SilkRoad also signed a strategic deal with Monroe, N.C.-based Six R
Communications, which will provide installation and service for the new technology. Doria declined to discuss other potential investors or
partners.
"This technology does not exist anywhere else," he added. "The feedback we're getting from analysts is, 'If you guys can do half of what you say you can do, you're going to turn the industry on its ear.' "
Bigger bandwidth is needed to carry the heavier digital payloads of
multimedia, sound and video files deployed on the Internet and corporate intranets, say industry observers. Insight Research estimates that bandwidth capacity over fiber-optic lines will increase to 25 trillion bits per second by 2002.
SilkRoad at a glance What: Makes high-speed fiber-optic network technology:
Founded: By Jonathan Thomas, Kevin Doria and Dr. James Palmer as Syncomm on Nov. 21, 1996. Recently renamed Silkroad after Marco Polo's trade route to the Orient. CEO: Kevin Doria Employees: about 70 Location: 9707 Waples St., San Diego Phone: (619) 457-6767 Web site:http:// www.silkroadcorp.com >>>>> |
