Optical Subsea Amplification & The DWDM Revolution
As noted in my previous post, optical amplification allow light signals to be boosted without being first decoded into a digital representation. Optical-electrical-optical conversions go away. Hence the computer necessary for OEO conversions disappears. This in turn sharply improves the amplifier's reliability and life span. It also eliminates the conversion delay so end-to-end latency is improved. Finally, no computer means less cost. But these benefits are really secondary. More importantly, the advent of optical amplifiers led to a quantum leap in bandwidth that can be attributed to two related developments. The first is that optical amplifiers impose no transmission limits on computer technology. This means that we can lay a cable in the water and then upgrade it at regular intervals as Moore's law improves the ability of computers to process optical signals. Nothing on the wet side changes. Indeed, the introduction of digital processing allowed 10G wave subsea cables like ...
