Zippier lightwave systems are in the works. The combination of two technological developments – erbium-doped fiber and solitons – is likely to allow a transmission of more than 100 Gbits per second.
Predictor: Voss, David
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 column for Wired magazine, David Voss, a senior editor of the journal Science, writes: ”When network designers talk about ‘big pipe,’ they mean optical fiber – strands of glass drawn as fine as human hair and as transparent as the purest crystal. The fiber allows huge amounts of data to be sent quickly and reliably between continents and enables new applications such as full-motion videoconferencing and high-speed computer networking. Right now, transoceanic fiber systems have a transmission speed of around 2.5 Gbits per second … even zippier lightwave systems are in the works. The combination of two technological developments – erbium-doped fiber and solitons – is likely to allow a transmission of more than 100 Gbits per second … Since 1975, the transmission capacity of fiber had increased by a factor of 10 every four years. But engineers hit a wall in the mid-1980s: it seemed that optical fiber had been fully optimized, and speeds were stalled at 0.15 Gbits per second. The problem stemmed from the fact that light pulses decline in strength as they travel down an optical pipe. Many nonoptical communications systems resolve this by using repeaters that grab the signal, amplify it, and send it on its way. All kinds of ideas for building optical repeaters on chips were tried but tossed out …The breakthrough came in 1987, when Emmanuel Desurvire (now with Alcatel France) and his colleagues at AT&T Bell Labs amplified optical pulses with a piece of fiber impregnated with the rare element erbium. The erbium ions in the glass are optically potent: when pumped up with infrared light, they want desperately to emit their stored power. So, when an optical data pulse comes along, the erbium dumps its energy by amplifying the pulse. And rather than pulling the pulses off at one end, stuffing them into an electronic box marked ‘amplifier,’ and squirting them out again, the group at Bell Labs built the amplifier into the fiber. Desurvire was able to do this by building on the work of [others and putting] the pieces together and in one step created the enabling technology to jack up fiber-optic transmission capacity by a factor of a hundred. Another promising technique involves the generation and propagation of optical solitons, or solitary waves – strange pulse shapes that could theoretically travel down a fiber forever.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Geek Page: You Say You Want More Bandwidth?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/geek.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney