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Optical repeaters have to pass your signal through an intermediate electronic stage anyway, since we have no purely optical valve/transistor equivalents (bosons don't interact with each other at all).

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This is not true. There is now a whole technology of optical amplifiers for fiber communications systems that used Ettrium doped fibers pumped with strong light from a laser at a slightly shorter wavelength. These fiber optical amplifiers have gains in the order of 10-12 db in a section of special doped fiber only about 10 feet long.

Very nice! ;-) Flouride based amplifiers should be able to handle up to 16 channels. Using state of the art time-multiplex stuff of 10 Gb/sec gives a total throughput of 160 Gb/Sec.... smoking!

The flavor of optical amplifier and end equipment being deployed by one large telecomm company (ahem) over the next couple of years uses 8 colors, each at 2.4 Gbps (OC-48), giving about 20 Gbps, which is about 10 times the current capacity (1.7 Gbps.) (Some other telecomm companies are deploying 3-colors of OC-48.) A nice thing about the optical amplifiers is that they have about triple the range of the current regenerators, so one amplifier can replace about 16-24 regens, reducing the amount of equipment that can fail and produce downtime. Because of this increased capacity, it's a good time to upgrade to SONET rings (which are dual rings that provide self-healing similar to FDDI's; SONET self-repair typically takes 60 ms instead of the several minutes to cross-connect the equivalent pile of T3s using current equipment.) If the FBI wants to wiretap this stuff, they'll have to get on the ball :-) #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com / billstewart@attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281 ! Frank Zappa for President !