Arriving at Pacific Tech's Applied Physics building last winter, I expected the usual academic theater — overhead projectors, stale coffee, tenure-track anxiety. Instead I found Victor Cheng, 34, a former Meridian Signal researcher who left the telephone monopoly in 1989 citing what he called "institutional cowardice." For three years Cheng had been working alone in a basement lab, building something the networking establishment insisted was physically impossible: a fiber switching array that could route data at speeds nobody had bothered to theorize about.
The Bandwidth Gospel
Cheng's prototype can push a terabit per second through a device the size of a shoebox. Three independent labs have confirmed the raw throughput numbers. When I asked him what this means for ordinary people connected by copper wire and 2400-baud modems, he said flatly: "It means you will never think about distance again." The implications are staggering. The entire architecture of the telephone network — and every assumption baked into the nascent Internet — would need to be reconsidered from scratch.