At 11:10 AM 5/15/96 -0400, brian dodds wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 1996, jim bell wrote:

...

But with fiber transmission probably less than 1/100th the cost of older coaxial transmission systems, per connection, it is unclear why they're even continuing to meter LD phone calls.

especially when 1Tb fiber is in practice - our phone calls will take only nanoseconds! :)

Reminds me of an old joke: "This computer's so fast it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds!"

anything included in that as to why they used a dfb laser for channel 16? or is it something obvious i'm missing?

They probably just wanted to establish that it could be done, to show that this wasn't dependant on high-cost laser systems. External cavity lasers raise cost and size substantially, but in a laboratory setting they're the most convenient to use.

i notice they're still using the encyclopedia/second benchmark..

It's an old habit, I suppose. It's hard to explain "one trillion", at least to non-tech types. A good modern replacement might be to say, "200 CDROM's per second", except that even today most people don't know how much storage a CDROM represents. "16 million one-way phone calls" is also helpful as a benchmark. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com