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All-optical switch device paves way for faster fiber-optic communication (phys.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Ironically, page won't load for me.

How is it a switch if there's no data processing? There needs to be a MAC table and the switch needs to send non-broadcast frames only to the right port. I don't see how it can have that intelligence without converting light to electricity and processing it.

And I'd take it that would mean no SFPs, which means not a very flexible device if all the ports are LC with a fixed wavelength and signal.

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  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this article is talking about a network switch, I think it's talking about a logic gate switch.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    There are such things as L1 switches, they are not really switches in the Ethernet sense but rather more like crossbar switches. They can selectively connect all traffic from two arbitrary ports together, and then change that on the fly, without a wiring change. Applications that are obsessed with getting the lowest possible latency might opt for those.

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    • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    Get me that sub ms latency!! But I'll take larger bandwidth too.

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    [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    How long do we thing before things like this are implemented at a larger ISP scale?

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