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Re: All-optical networking Was: [Re: Notes on the Internet forBell Heads]

  • From: Chris Kilbourn
  • Date: Fri Jul 12 15:13:00 2002

At 2:32 PM -0400 7/12/02, Ralph Doncaster wrote:
Add in the fact that optical sniffing, while not impossible by any means
today, will increasingly become non-trivial as bandwidth increases. Which
is exactly one of the 'problems' they expect optical network to solve.
You mean just expensive, right? i.e. a couple transponders and an OC48 or
OC192 switch.
Cost is a factor, certainly, but the storage of the captured
data becomes the larger problem.

In the TB or PB range of optical data transmission, where and how do you
store the captured information? Unless you have TB's of solid state drives
to stream electrons into after an optoelectronic photon -> electron
conversion your only other option is to store the photons in loops of
fiber with an optical repeater.

Until we have quantum computers which might be able to parse the data in
real-time, we still need a buffer to store the data in before we can
look for the needle in the haystack.

Even with some nifty filtering on the sniffer, you're potentially
looking at obscenely large amounts of information to store.

I would expect that the distance of fiber you will need to store the
data in will be the gating factor, which means it tilts more towards a
physical issue than a cost issue.

If I need a few thousand kilometers of fiber as a storage loop, it's
kind of hard to move around efficiently. :-)


Regards,

Chris Kilbourn
Founder
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