Optical Networking Changes Landscape For Cyber Students

What is Optical Networking?
The future of Universities

In the early 1980s, a revolution in telecommunications networks began that was spawned by the use of a relatively unassuming technology, fiber-optic cable.

Since then, the tremendous cost savings and increased network quality has led to many advances in the technologies required for optical networks, the benefits of which are only beginning to be realized.

What is Optical Networking?

Optical networking technology use light particles, or photons, to transport information over hair-thin glass fibres, enabling service providers to offer hundreds of times more bandwidth without incurring the cost of laying more fibre.

The future of Universities

So if you can imagine the future of the university involving online classrooms and virtual professors can you imagine attending an art history lecture in Rome, touring an archeological dig in Cairo, and participating in a physics lab in Beijing - all on the same day? Optical networking technology, which uses tiny light particles (or photons) to instantly transmit mind-boggling amounts of information, will help make this possible in a truly realistic way - and it's less than a generation away.

Photons may well be as important to the 21st century as electrons have been to the 20th century, driving an unprecedented communications revolution.

The world's most powerful broadband networks will all be optical - delivering vast amounts of information at the speed of light. Universities that harness the power of optical networking will develop exciting and innovative ways to create and share knowledge across campuses, time zones, and cultures.

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