City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

252 CITY OF LIGHT
space. Anyone who tried to see all the exhibits would have had less than a
minute and a half per booth.
Don Keck stood in Corning’s sprawling booth when I stopped by. I asked
if the field’s first technical conference, back in 1975, could have fit into the
Corning booth. He looked around and said it probably could have. The booths
were bigger and more elaborate than ever before, and hundreds of new companies
had showed up. Many were start-ups, funded during the preceding
two years of frantic growth, and making their first public appearance.
The hero experiments were out in full force. A team from Japan’s NEC
Corp. had pushed a record 10.92 trillion bits per second through 117 kilometers
of fiber, by using a new developmental type of optical amplifier along
with erbium amplifiers. Alcatel engineers squeezed 10.24 trillion bits per second
through 100 kilometers with only erbium amplifiers by packing the
wavelengths closer together. 42 Both were elegant experiments, but lacked the
practical impact of demonstrations that spanned transoceanic distances. Another
Alcatel team sent three trillion bits per second through 7380 kilometers
of fiber, enough to span the Atlantic. A team from TyCom Laboratories, the
part of the old Bell Labs that had developed submarine cables, sent a trillion
bits through 9000 kilometers, enough to span the Pacific. 43
Top executives generally were optimistic at a forum held before the conference
at the Disneyland Hotel. They talked about plans to boost transmission
speeds on each optical channel to a staggering 40 billion bits per second. It
wasn’t clear how they would solve the formidable technical problems, but no
one saw show-stoppers.
Looking back, there were warnings that all was not rosy. In the opening
talk, John Dexheimer, a consultant with years of experience in investment
banking, warned of a $250 billion ‘‘debt hangover’’ of money borrowed to
build new networks. He noted that failures had gone beyond on-line pet shops
to include a well-funded telecommunications start-up, Ironbridge, which had
hired Paul Lazay as its CEO. Looking back over the past year, Dexheimer said
that the demand for optics stock had exceeded the supply, and some stupid
ideas had been funded. ‘‘I got a couple of invitations to hear pitches for a
company that could transport light at twice the speed of light,’’ 44 he said,
drawing laughter from a technically savvy audience that appreciated the absurdity.
Walking the exhibit floor, I saw the truth of Dexheimer’s warning that too
many companies were trying to do the same things. I also saw elaborate and
expensive booths that offered no real information about what the companies
did. Yet those problems hardly seemed to threaten the whole industry.
In reality, the air of optimism was piped direct from Fantasyland. The
industry had charged ahead so fast that it had run off the edge of a cliff
without realizing it. The laws of cartoon physics held across the street from
Mickey Mouse’s kingdom. Cartoon characters don’t feel the pull of gravity
until they look down. Yet like Wile E. Coyote in hot pursuit of Roadrunner,
the fiber industry eventually noticed the lack of foot traction and looked down.