A rchive Date
[ 13-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Information Technologies ]
sub-Categoy
[ Lucent ]
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[Lucent mirror magic to boost Net speed
Using microscopic mirrors, the telecommunications giant believes it can speed Net traffic 10 times with new router technology
By Reuters
November 9, 1999 9:05 AM PT
MURRAY HILL, N.J. - Lucent Technologies Inc. on Tuesday said it had created a breakthrough technology using microscopic mirrors that will allow the world's largest communications carriers to boost the capacity of long-distance networks up to 10 times current Internet speeds.
Lucent (NYSE: LU), the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, said it had created a router - the equipment that directs traffic from one segment of a network to another - that's capable of delivering 10 terabits, or trillion bits, of data per second. This is 10 times that of rival products.
The WaveStar LambdaRouter, as the product is known, operates at speeds that would, in effect, allow the printed contents of whole libraries to be transmitted in a single second. And its capacity will grow even further over time.
Lucent said the high-capacity, all-optical router uses a series of microscopic mirrors to instantly direct and route optical signals from fiber to fiber in a network, without first converting them to electrical form as must be done currently. Its speed is a function of eliminating such electrical bottlenecks in the network.
Dramatically reduce power needs
This will save service providers up to 25 percent in operational costs (in part by cutting electrical power consumption by 100 times) and enable them to direct network traffic 16 times faster than electrical switches, Lucent said.
"Optical wavelengths are the true building blocks of next-generation networks, and Lucent will be the first to make all-optical networks a reality," Gerry Butters, president of Lucent's Optical Networking Group, said of the latest fiber-optic networks used to transmit large volumes of voice, data and video.
"Lucent is the first to offer a completely optical router with virtually limitless capacity, enabling its customers to economically and incrementally expand their networks as traffic increases," he said.
Lucent said its 10-terabit LambdaRouter paves the way for communications network providers to offer customers instant Internet programming and other high-speed data and video services. It also will help these carriers boost revenue by enabling them to sell and manage network capacity down to the level of individual optical wavelengths, the company said.
The system will take in any voice, data or video signal, and each of the initial 256 channels will support wavelengths at speeds up to 40 gigabits, or billions per bits, per second; this is 16 times faster than today's electrical switches.
The first release of the WaveStar LambdaRouter will be available to select customers in July 2000, and be made commercially available in December 2000.
PSINet gets routed
In a related announcment, the company said PSINet Inc. (Nasdaq: PSIX) had selected Lucent's NX64000 switch/router equipment for Internet access wholesaler's global network, making it possible to deliver dramatically increased volumes of data, voice and video traffic.
Using Lucent's switch/router, PSINet will be the first network operator to carry high-speed data traffic at 10-gigabit-per-second speeds over a core fiber optic network; that rate is a 400 percent increase over today's standard 2.5 billion bit per second transmission rates.
The NX64000 will act as the on-ramp and off-ramp for the WaveStar LamdaRouter, creating demand, in the form of massive volumes of data traffic, for Lucent's high-capacity router, said Mary Ward, a Lucent spokeswoman.]
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