PiM> Rob, its 50 GHz. I think that's what you meant right?

nope, five hundred gigahertz.

sure, they may have snuck it in there in January and I didn't notice. mea culpa.

it's still exciting.

although, as queasy as it makes my engineering stomach, they like to mix 50 gigabits in there willy-nilly like salt in the soup.

perhaps for the easier marketing familiarity. Cisco etc. market their DWDM optics in gigabits per lambda, so POET's slideware is built to match it so the suits don't get confussed.

or maybe because their layperson typist is retarded and doesn't understand signal rate or the nuances of symbol encoding in a digital transmission path (i.e., baud).

with the right encoding and enough power you can shove 50Gbps thru rusty barbed wire.

for that, you don't need finesse, you need a big-ass jackhammer.

in comparison, modulating a bitstream (or wagging around the logic bits in a CPU or tri-state memory, or both) nearly two hundred times faster than what's there in silicon today -- using the energy equivalent of a potato instead of a nuclear reactor?

that's the sexy part.

GLAL,

R.