Greetings from Jay Brandon,

This is my first blog at Lightfleet and I hope you’ll enjoy getting a brief update on some of the recent happenings here.

The big news this week is the return of Dennis Hightower to the Lightfleet board of directors. Dennis brings a wealth of experience and was the former president of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications and a Harvard business school professor. Dennis is very impressed with the major product progress Lightfleet has made since he last visited us in January of 2006.

A local paper recently published an interesting story on using light to boost computing speed. In the article, a researcher at IBM was quoted as saying “Photons can move data tens or hundreds of times faster than electrons on copper wires” and a senior vice president at Intel said “Copper, our traditional interconnect technology, is running out of speed.” I’m excited to be at Lightfleet as we are blazing the trail into this exciting new area of optical high performance.

That’s all from me. Until next time,
Jay

By Steve Alten

I just read about a 75-year-old woman in Karlstad, Sweden who had a 40-gigabit per second Internet connection installed in her house. Karlstad Stadsnät in conjunction with Cisco installed the prototype to show the potential of fiber optics in residential usage. 40 Gb/s is enough to download an entire DVD in 2 seconds or to access 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously.

So how did such blazing performance affect Sigbritt Löthberg’s life? Did she become the multimedia envy of the block? I’m afraid that would be a big “no”. She primarily used the excessive heat generated by the networking equipment to dry her laundry. She’s looking forward to a planned 100 Gb/s upgrade that is being planned so she can dry her neighbor’s laundry too.

It’s easy to overlook the excess heat generated by networking switches, even if it’s based on fiber optics instead of copper. A data center can be designed to handle the load, but Sigbritt’s experience is a humorous reminder of how wasteful of energy network switches can be.

Systems based on Lightfleet DBOI technology use much less energy than conventional switches. If your primary goal is to dry your clothes, by all means, stick with the status quo!

By Steve Alten

Early in 2007, a group of Lightfleet marketing people were discussing the imminent public launch of Lightfleet’s simultaneous, all-to-all, continuous, broadcast optical interconnect invention. Several of us who can’t solve 2^nd order differential equations in our heads anymore, couldn’t help but comment that simultaneous, all-to-all, continuous, broadcast optical interconnect didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Even the most dedicated evangelist would soon start taking liberties and shorten it ad-hoc. We needed a cool name to call our technology.

A thousand words aren’t always better than a picture

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By Steve Alten

I’m fortunate to live in the Pacific Northwest, where the electricity rates are among the lowest in the nation. My family never turns off our six home computers. We have computers for every family member’s desk, one in the kitchen and we have three PC media centers hooked up to big screen TVs. We have grown so attached of our beloved PCs and Macs that we really wouldn’t choose to ever live without them. However, when I got my electricity bill this month, I couldn’t help but reminisce that it was higher than the monthly payment for the very first new car I bought! I can ask the family to turn lights off when they’re not using them, or to stop using the oven and eat out more, but I can’t really expect them to cut back on the deep love affair with their computer. Corporate and institutional users aren’t very different from my family.

I was the only one who truly liked my first car

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Jay Brandon
Chris Kruell
Steve Alten
Max Bliss
Iain Mackie