All-optical switches, once deemed to be well ahead of their time, could be making the scene later this year, or so says Glenn Wellbrock, director of backbone and network technologies for Verizon Business, in a story at Telephony. Wellbrock predicts that at least three equipment vendors will unveil all-optical switches with port density of 128x128 or higher later this year. He also says Verizon plans to begin deploying all-optical switching gear in its network sometime next year. Expectations of a bandwidth flood, plus the emergence of other all-optical gear like reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers in other parts of carrier networks, apparently is coaxing carrier toward a reconsideration of all-optical switches.
For more:
- read this story at Telephony