Subject: RE: MPLS and Optical network

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:36:50 -0500

> From: "Alexander Marhold" <[email-masked]> 

    > optical packet recognition ... and buffering is future and would lead
    > to an pure optical router

Actually, I had a chat with an optical expert (someone who'd worked with
Edwin? Land, IIRC) who struck me as very sharp, and his take was that for
fundamental reasons of physics, we're unlikely to ever see pure optical
processing.

His explanation (which sounds plausible to me) is that photons interact more
weakly than do electrons, so it takes longer (timewise) for two photons to
complete an interaction. So you'll never get the speed (and thus size) out of
all-optical components that you will out of electronic components.

Now, maybe some genius will figure out a way around this (like the multiple
wavelength pure optical amplifiers - now *there's* a major stroke of genius),
but until I see the counterexample, I think his reasoning is powerful.

	Noel

---

From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 22:30:13 +0000

>>fundamental reasons of physics, we're unlikely to ever see pure optical

two points of disagreement 
1/ quantum computing
2/ stubornness

i put it 2 years before someone does some decent header processing in
pure optical components. buffering is easy btw, but thats another
story...the issue is to forget about the cost of memory. think about
throwing 7 orders of magnitude too much at the proble but it costing 9
orders of magnitude less.
 >>but until I see the counterexample, I think his reasoning is powerful.

 cheers

   jon