May 2008 Archives

Telepresence seems like a very modern idea. But it turns out that back in 1884 an inventor called Alexander Stanhope St George came up with the a concept called the Telectroscope, an optical device that miraculously allows people to see from London to New York via a tunnel that runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

St George tried to dig his tunnel and failed, but his papers were found in the attic by his grandson, the artist Paul St George, who claims to have completed the work. The Telectroscope opened this week, and folk can now sign up to communicate with friends or loved ones on the other side of the ocean. But they should remember to take a cellphone or a pen and message board — the link only transmits video. The Telectroscope will remain open until June 15th.

I like the romantic notion that the device works using a transatlantic tunnel, as St George maintains but, rather predictably, it is actually the product of two high-definition cameras connected through a fibre-optic link. Shame.

Ethernet is 35 years old today, according to inventor Bob Metcalfe. "Ethernet's birthday is on May 22nd of this year, and I'm hoping my wife will go out to dinner with me that evening," he told the assembled audience at the OFC/NFOEC show back in February. (And yes, I've been saving up this little factoid ever since).

Ethernet's come a long way since 1973 when it ran at 2.4 Mbit/s, which was a pretty zippy speed for the time. "Imagine my delight at conferences like this where the discussion was whether 300 baud was enough," Metcalfe recalled. "At 600 baud the characters raced past on the screen so fast you couldn't read them anyway, so why would you need a 600 baud modem?"

In 1978 Metcalfe worked on a fibre-optic version of Ethernet, which ran at 150 Mbit/s. "Ironically in 1978 even though we were running at 150Mbit/s with this optical fibre system, the core circuits of the network were running at 50 kbit/s, 3000 times slower," he said. Needless to say this fibre-optic Ethernet did not take off in 1978, in fact it would be 20 more years before Ethernet went optical again.

The Ethernet we have today has changed almost out of all recognition from the Ethernet of 35 years ago. For starters it's broken out of the LAN and into the wide area network. What's more it has to handle time-sensitive video and voice traffic, something that was never imagined at the start. And of course it's a lot faster. The next hike in speed takes us to 100 Gbit/s, with standards likely to be finalized later this year by the IEEE Higher Speed Study Group. I wonder what Ethernet will look like in another 35 years... because I'd like to bet it will still be with us in one shape or another.

UK prime minister Gordon Brown is embracing the digital age by launching an internet version of Prime Minister's Question Time. Or to put it another way, he's finally cottoned on to the phenomenon of social networking.

The initiative certainly seems popular — over 4,000 users have already subscribed to the site — but whether it lives up to expectations remains to be seen. Brown is inviting submissions by 21 June, which seems an awfully long time for a generation reared on instant messaging, and he does not guarantee to answer all questions anyway.

I know what my question to the PM would be. The UK government would like fibre-to-the-home to be delivered by the private sector, but the private sector's view is that the market doesn't justify the investment. There's a huge disconnect between the two standpoints, with the result that fibre-to-the home penetration in the UK is virtually zero. How does the government plan to encourage the necessary investment?

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed a few changes to the fibresystems.org homepage. These changes are designed to bring more value to the site for you, our readers, by expanding the amount of content, and making it easier to find. After all, our job is to make your job easier, by delivering breaking news and insightful analysis of the optical networking industry. We hope that the new changes will allow us to do that even more effectively.

For starters, we've added a top story panel to the homepage. This new feature will allow us to highlight some of the in-depth feature articles from the magazine. In addition, we plan to introduce some exclusive web-only features in the second-half of the year.

The other key change is that the fibresystems.org blog now has its own panel on the homepage so you can see at a glance what's new and click straight to it.

Other changes in the pipeline in the next few months include improvements to the search tool, which will allow you to search the site by date or by relevance, and to filter the results from different sections of the site.

Plus we'll soon be launching a video channel to bring you vendor perspectives on the industry. Details of the video channel are being kept under wraps for now; all will be revealed at the end of June.

One final point: fibresystems.org is as much your website as it is ours. As part of our ongoing development work, we'd love to get your feedback on what we could be doing better for you in terms of content delivery and site functionality. If you've got any constructive suggestions, even if you want to have a rant, just click on the commenting tool at the end of this article. Alternatively, you can drop me a note in confidence at pauline.rigby@iop.org.

I've just discovered that Bob Metcalfe's plenary speech on Terabit Ethernet at OFC/NFOEC has been uploaded to the conference website. The audio quality is terrible, (compression may have something to answer for here), but it's worth a look if you missed the original.

Audio-only recordings of the plenary speeches by fibre-optic pioneer Herwig Kogelnik of Bell Labs, and Pieter Poll, CTO of Qwest, are also online.