… sent lawyers to every engineering workshop on roadside cabinets…

In around 4 to 6 years, these Telecom lawyers will be sent to workshops on roadside where bulky exchange cabinets are nowhere to be seen. The bulky cabinets would be replaced by components of approximately one square centimeter in area.

I attended a symposium at the University of Auckland in December , 2006 for the opening of their Jack-Dodd (Otago/Auckland) Photonics Centre, where one presentation from a professor from University of Sydney, Benjamin J. Eggleton talked about these new state-of-the-art photonic chips (move your mouse around the diagram) where they are currently developing proto-types. Their work is done in partnership with some commercial vendors as Lucent, Intel and others.

Benjamin said in his talk that he estimated that these new generation photonic chips which size is about one square centimeter or less, would replace all the current bulky roadside cabinets that we see today. Everything that the current bulky roadside cabinet is capable of, could be achieved by this new types of photonic chip. However the photonic chip has a massive transmission capacity that is not achieved by these current bulky cabinets. This is pushing broadband telecommunication to the next level by 1000-fold faster & efficient in his words. The chip contains no semiconductor material in it, all optical miniaturized optical components. There is an optical amplifier (light-to-light), an optical multiplexer, beam splitter, optical delays, etc…

Therefore Telecom lawyers won’t be able to spot the usual place that the workshop held as the roadside cabinets would just simply disappeared in around 4 to 6 years, being replace by these photonic chips. This is only true if Telecom install a nationwide all fibre-network. These chips don’t work in copper/fibre hybrid network, since the chip does not contain any semi-conductor devices to interact with electrical current that is transmitted via copper.