Q: Kids in grade school learn about Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and so on. How do you think the work that you and others in the optical networking industry are doing right now stacks up in importance to those kinds of innovations — the light bulb, the telephone?

A: I think it’s important, even though the magnitudes are very different. In that part of the industrial revolution, the innovator, entrepreneur, and businessman were all one person — and the whole industry grew at a certain rate. Today, the network itself creates a very new environment, because in the connected world, people can create value wherever they are, and in whatever way they want — and the business cycle moves very rapidly. The credit that the entrepreneurs deserve is the rate at which they can take all these pieces together and put them to good use.

Q: What needs to happen before the dream of the all-optical network is realized?

A: Well, I’m not sure that the all-optical dream is a valid dream — not in my mind. It’s crazy, the way Wall Street works. People like optical networking and, therefore, if something is “all optical” it has to be much better than just “optical!” That’s the theme that a lot of people have been playing up. All-optical means that you convert information into an optical format and you leave it in the optical format all the way until it gets out at the other end — which is not feasible. It’s not possible to keep the information in the light format for that long. You have to convert it back into the electrical format because signals get corrupted and so on. So what you do is you create a lot of these optical islands and you connect them. What happens as time goes on is that those islands get bigger and bigger — maybe someday you’ll have all optical.

Q: Won’t we be able to back an optical pipe straight up to a computer?