Oops

I haven't heard of reliable transmission beyond 40 km with using some = kind of amplification in-line (Erbium Doped Fiberoptic Amplifier [EDFA], like they use in transoceanic cables).

?-)

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I sort of knew about that, but haven't yet got to exploit it in real life. I quite like LVDS and managed to design it into the 1998 project that never got beyond circuit diagrams (more than a 100 pages of detailed A4 sheets), but I've got a horror of PECL - if you short a PECL output to ground, you blow up the drive transistors. HP once admitted that more than 90% of the returns for repairs on their laser interferometer were caused by exactly that, but they had been silly enough to drive a coal with differential PECL, so that the cable braid was live ... which was very silly indeed.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You might have looked. Basslink Telecom has a deployed 290 km unamplified link.

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I wonder how much "lock-in ware" is involved in that. Ultra performance fiber is much of the equation here. Of course the cost of installation = is usually far more than that of the cable.

Thanks, you pointed me to something i hadn't seen before.

?-)

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Good discussion in

My favorite quote:

At the AAAS meeting's discussion, CERN's director of research, Sergio Bertolucci, placed his bet on what the results would be: "I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time."

("if you think you can prove that Einstein was wrong, you are wrong")

You're awfully literal-minded, JKK. You actually have to polish connectors when you put them on, for one thing. The point is that saying that it was a loose connection is playing fast and loose with the truth. (Probably the journalist's fault--there's no reason to doubt the team's honesty AFAIK.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Just the same, i have examined (and watched them being made) a _lot_ of OTDR traces, power meter readings, watched (and a few times did) fusion splicing, done core diameter checks (a bit uncommon), watched (and occasionally did) connector installation (with polishing) and pigtail installation/splicing (the norm today). And i effectively signed off on much of those installations ([say over 40 roadway miles, usually with two or three cables] i was usually the technical expert that the person with the responsibility relied on). That ran from about 10 to 18 years ago. = It has colored how i read the article.

?-)

Roughly as predicted.

I like Feynman's remark about string theory (maybe not verbatim): "Scientists make predictions - string theorists make excuses"

A scientific theory can never be proven correct, only disproved. Science progresses by destroying theories.