While IBM continues to play the sceptic about optical processing – could it be dissimulating just to put competitors off the track? – AT&T Co is so confident that light is the wave of the future that it is forecasting that within about five years, at least some of the network equipment that it sells to telephone companies will switch communications signals as pulses of light rather than electricity, producing a dramatic increase in those systems’ capacity (not ‘alf): such equipment will be based on free-space photonics, so that light pulses will not need to be guided by glass fibres, and it will apply many of the same technologies as the company’s experimental digital optical processor first demonstrated in by AT&T Bell Laboratories in January, and since described in an integrated form (CI No 1,406).
