Web surfing at the speed of light Web surfing at the speed of light The future of the Internet will be optical, according to engineer Ben Yoo at the University of California, Davis. Yoo is leading a team to build a trial optical Internet system, to be tested on the UC Davis campus later this year.
Optical networks use light pulses to transmit data instead of electrons.
Existing optical switches use tiny mirrors to redirect light pulses. Yoo's router takes a different approach, switching light pulses by changing their wavelength. This technology potentially allows much faster switching than mirror-based technologies, said Yoo. Packets spend a brisk 100 nanoseconds in the optical router, while lazing for several microseconds in the best available electronic routers. The basics of Yoo's optical router were presented at the Optical Fiber Communication 2001 conference in Anaheim last month.