[ILUG] New technology/ maybe OT

[Niall O Broin]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 03:52:55PM -0000, silvan wrote:

> As you might know the German ISDN is fibre rather than Copper high- speed
> ISDN as it is in use here.

What do you mean by that exactly ? ISDN to the subscribers premises is over
an ordinary copper pair. If you have fibre to your premises I think you
might like to have a tad mode than 2B+D :-)

> Now the thought goes like this (developed by Munich University):
> You get a white laser-beam and "comb" (split) the different frequencies
> (colours)
> and use each of them as carriers. Therefore you get around a hundred in one.

This is not new - it's called wave division multiplexing (does anyone know
why it's not simply called frequency division multiplexing ? I imagine it's
because FDM commonly refers to the much older technology used over coax but
I can't really see a difference, except that of course with WDM each
channel's capacity is a little :-) larger than with classic FDM)

> I'm saying here. If that is to come, all of what we know today will be crap!

Well, the rate of change of technology is such that this is always true.
However, if tomorrow Eircom's entire backbone changed to WDM over multi mode
fibre, it wouldn't make a brown bit of difference to Joe Ordinary Punter.



Niall