Uniting the complementary technologies of optical amplifiers and solitons shows great potential to form an almost ideal transmission system.
Solitons are pulses of light that retain their shape over long distances.
Optical amplifiers boost optical signals without the need for costly conversion from photonics to electronics and back again as is done with conventional regenerators. Optoelectronics, the integration of photonics and electronics, will continue to grow. By 1999, some machines will have 20,000- word vocabularies and the ability to understand continuous speech. Telecom '99 attendees may all be wearing ear devices with the ability to select the language in which they wish to hear the speaker. Simultaneous, automated translation may be a reality by then.