Lucent Technologies later this year plans to roll out a new technology that will serve as a "digital pump" for the Internet, an optical networking system that increases the capacity of fiber optic cable by five times.
Called the Lucent Wave Star system, the technology can transmit as much as 400 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a single strand of fiber, which Lucent claims is equivalent to the "entire" per second traffic of the Internet presently. Overall, the technology can accommodate eight fiber optic cables and has a full capacity of as much as 3.2 terabits per second for data, video, and voice - equal to transmitting 90,000 volumes of an encyclopedia in a second, said Lucent.
"This is not a switch. It is a box between the fiber and the switch and is also connected with the amplifier," said Gary Bonham, a Lucent spokesman. "This is a transmission system. This is a pump, rather than a pipe."
The networking technology, currently under development at Bell Labs, will be beta-tested in the third quarter of this year. AT&T will be the first company to deploy the new system, which is called Wave Star OLS 400G.
The introduction of digital subscriber lines and other high-speed access technologies for Internet service providers and telcos prompted Lucent to develop the technology starting 18 months ago. Net backbone providers need technology back on the network to support those consumer access services.
"In today's world, you get up to 10 gigabits across one fiber," said Harry Bosco, chief operating officer of Lucent's optical networking group. "What we're announcing is that most providers can get up to 16 wavelengths, and each one is a different colored light. But we can put 80 wavelengths on one fiber. We're basically expanding the capacity of the fiber."
Last summer, Lucent patented the technology that undergirds the Wave Star system and developed it into a product in the intervening months, said Scott Grout, product marketing vice president.
"The magic that is taking place is that we're is that we're putting multiple light-wave systems and multiple transport systems on this one piece of fiber, all at slightly different colors of light," said Grout, noting that photons, or light waves, are what convey the data across fiber optic networks.
What do observers think of this technology? Is it a revolution or an evolution?
"Lucent's system is truly evolutionary, and actually of more than passing significance in that it theoretically extends the finite capacity of the backbone or infrastructure of the Internet exponentially rather than linearly," said one analyst. "Basically this creates a vacuum begging to be filled with both an increase in volume traffic as well as bandwidth-intensive applications."
Lucent said it will sell the technology to all comers, but analysts wonder whether it would be a more effective strategy to use the Wave Star as a proprietary technology with their own version of DSL, and position it against competing technologies.
