Word: fibers
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...houses what could be the future of the telecommunications industry. Called a LambdaRouter, the device contains 512 microscopic mirrors, each of which can switch light waves packed with more than 10 billion bits of information--roughly the contents of 10,000 novels--from one hair-thin strand of optical fiber to another...
...crunch. Lucent was first a beneficiary and then a victim of the race to wire the U.S. with the speed-of-light data pipes known as broadband. And now it has company in its misery, as broadband carnage has spread from phone companies like AT&T and WorldCom to fiber makers like Corning to optical-systems builders like Nortel Networks to components makers like JDS Uniphase and networking companies like Cisco Systems...
...results have been plunging profits, mass layoffs and imploding stock values for companies that had been NASDAQ supernovas and among the chief reasons for the stock market's rise. At BlueStone Capital Securities, an index of 13 fiber-optic heavyweights that includes Lucent, Cisco, Nortel and JDS Uniphase has fallen 78% since last July, a plunge that has cost investors more than $1.1 trillion in market value. The percentage decline exceeds the drop for NASDAQ as a whole, which fell 51% over the same stretch...
...again. Few industry leaders expect business conditions to improve much this year. Phone companies "are really conserving their capital because of the severe downturn in the economy," says Clarence Chandran, Nortel's chief operating officer. Nortel is a one-company bear market. The world's No. 1 producer of fiber-optic systems, Nortel accelerated the industry's slide and NASDAQ's sell-off last month by abruptly slashing its 2001 forecasts and declaring that it would idle 10,000 employees, or nearly 10% of its work force...
...broadband revolution promised to bring every household fast Internet access along with video-on-demand, interactive TV and the ability to flash Libraries of Congress around the world at whim. Amazingly, the sellers of this dream overlooked the fact that many homes and offices connect to the 21st century fiber network with twisted-pair copper wires--late 19th century tech. These could hardly keep up with the bandwidth demands of the Napster...