First Looks Hands-on reviews of new shipping products. Product Guides Find the perfect product in dozens of categories. Speed of Light As Internet traffic increases, the need for greater bandwidth is fueling the growth of optical networks. Optical networking uses light waves traveling over glass, instead of electrons over copper, as the transmission technology. Lasers generate, amplify, and distribute the light down hairlike fibers.
Optical networks are faster and provide more capacity than their electrical counterparts.
And with Net traffic doubling every three months, optical networks may be the only way to handle the escalating demand for bandwidth. In five years, it will be 100 Gbps. We need to develop the capacity for that traffic. Methods of achieving that capacity include rolling out more fiber networks and improving the efficiency of existing fiber. The latter approach has already shown good results.