Most of the area this canal would be built through is jungle with no roads anyway, there would only be a need for a few bridges on the east coast and a few bridges on the west coast.

They've really never gone away, they're just going away at the consumer level. At the transport and wholesale level, circuits are the past, present and future. Openflow is a good example at the Datacenter and maybe soon the carrier aggregation layer. G.709 OTN is a good example at the large bandwidth long-haul layer.

T1s and T3s are also plesiosysnchronous! But yea, the OP definitely got synchronous and symmetrical confused.

The big deal here is that there are a lot of fiber types that we couldn't go beyond 2.5G on due to effects like four wave mixing, chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion. Those fibers have been sitting idle, and now have value again due to the fundamental differences in how the 'coherent' optics are modulated. In many cases that's going to mean millions of dollars of construction can be avoided because existing fiber can be used again.

I'll admit I skipped the last couple of sentences in the post, mostly out of pain. Now I see you're in the academic world, which explains a lot. Sorry.

It's heartbreaking to see how little the average slashdotter actually knows about technology when they start talking about my field.

First, optical amplifiers are not 're-encoders' which isn't a real term anyway, the closest thing to what you mean is a 'transponder' and those are only used at end-points. The two types of optical amplifiers are Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers and Raman effect amplifiers. They do not receive and retransmit, they literally add photons of the exact same wavelength and polarity as the original signal, with no interruption.

This article is ultimately about how the new coherent DSP enabled 100G and beyond fiber optic gear is actually much more tolerant of noise, chromatic dispersion, and polarization mode dispersion than the previous 10G on-off keyed gear. That allows carriers to go back and use fiber types that we used years ago that are obsolete, such as Zero Dispersion Shifted fiber.

Yes, technology always offers improvements, but this is not an incremental improvement. This is a huge leap forward.

His point is that crack smoking doesn't automatically make one lose weight. Nice rebuttal.

There is no correct way to pluralize Texas, there can be only one Texas. Anyway, just because Australia or Alaska or Siberia are larger, doesn't mean Texas still isn't a big place. You can drive from Beaumont, Texas to Los Angeles and by the time you're halfway there, you're still in Texas.

That's probably not the case. It seems like these days a presidential candidate is chosen for broad(ish) appeal, but the VP is chosen to be a party hard liner to galvanize the faithful voting blocks and keep the party legislators in line. See Biden, Cheney, Gore. I think Palin was a calculated choice to try to get a group of people, Tea Party, to vote Republican instead of Libertarian.

My chromebook is faster, easier to use, has better battery life, and has a much better screen than my smart phone or my kindle fire. Also, both of those have to be rebooted occasionally. Not sure if I've ever done anything but put the Chromebook to sleep. It really was a smart purchase.

You are overthinking it. If I wanted to tap someone's network, I'd find a splice case in the middle of nowhere and splice in a 90/10 splitter during some unrelated outage so it wouldn't be noticed. To the victim it would just look like a relatively poor splice on their OTDR readings.

Ah, well that's also not really true. Centurylink, Frontier, TDS, Windstream, Sprint, and others I'm probably forgetting are all still out there running ILEC markets. Not that I disagree with your conclusion, from a wholesale perspective I can assure you AT&T is even more disfunctional and apathetic than they are at the retail level.

AT&T didn't buy up baby bells. SBC bought up other baby bells and then also bought what was left of AT&T and took the name over. AT&T itself was withering away after the breakup. Both Verizon and what is now AT&T have their origins in local carriers, not long distance. Anyway, they're not evil. They're just fat and lazy and that makes everything more expensive for them as well.

Thanks for actually posting an intelligent comment. Everytime there's a story that involves technology I work with I realize how ignorant most of Slashdot really is.
The API I think is the key observation. Forget websites though, that's chump change.
SDN is actually really interesting for my industry, long haul fiber networks. Today we have multiple layers of equipment, the physical fiber plant, the DWDM layer, the OTN layer, the Sonet or Packet transport layer, the IP/MPLS layer. Today those layers don't talk to each other so all the configurations are manual and static. The hope is that SDN succeeds where GMPLS has sort of stalled. GMPLS is really only used in some proprietary network implementations, and not as an interface between different vendor equipment as it was envisioned.

Also, Infinera's best is currently 160ch x 50gbit/s and has been shipping since last year.