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The 1990s saw an incredible amount of excitement about optical networking technology. Many start-up companies with potentially viable new technology seemed very “hot” to investors, especially venture capital firms and well established technology companies in telecommunications like Lucent, Nortel, and Cisco. There was a mad scramble to either invest in or acquire a number of these new start-up companies including Chromatis, Ignitus, Sycamore, Lightera, etc. Winners ended up paying billions of dollars for companies with commercially unproven technology or technology that could be emulated by others. Over the past two years, the optical networking industry has lost over $500 billion in investor value, and it offers a good example of market factors leading to the winner’s curse.

Fast or slow light propagation means that the group velocity of a quasi-monochromatic light pulse propagating in a resonant medium can be significantly faster or slower than the light speed in a vacuum. Since the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, studies on this subject have attracted a great deal of interest. Remarkable progress has been achieved, based on various nonlinear optical interactions in resonant media. The fundamental research on this subject can enrich our understanding of special relativity and causality in physics. On the other hand, those mechanisms and techniques developed for fast and slow light propagation have provided the potential for many future applications, such as optical buffers and variable delay lines for optical networks, optical computing, optical telecommunications, optical data storage, and signal processing.

Things were very different 20 years ago. There was no Internet and no e-mail. The first text message had yet to be sent. Many European countries were still opening enormous transmission towers to put the finishing touches to their national television networks. Go back another 20 years, just as the first push-button phones were hitting the market, and a single computer would have taken up an entire living room should anyone have ever considered installing one. International phone calls were so expensive that people often timed them with stopwatches. The world has shrunk considerably since those days. E-mailing a research report or chatting online has become second nature. We can collaborate with someone on the other side of the world almost as easily as we can with a person two streets away. Companies use the Internet to outsource their accounts to India. Photographers sell their work all over the world. And if we want to, we can listen to Japanese radio in our European offices. Much of this book was written far away from the experts we interviewed. Yet in all the hundreds of phone calls, e-mails, and video sessions that went into its production, nobody paid the slightest thought to the physical distances separating us. As the world shrinks, the way we use our communication networks intensifies. The volume of data we send is doubling every year, and the capacity of computer networks and telephone cables inexorably increases, too. Communication technology continues to improve at a rapid rate. And with each doubling of capacity, the price of transporting information halves. Things will no doubt look very different again 20 years from now. By that time, for instance, regions that currently lack Internet access will have been connected. The first signs of these changes are already apparent. Africans are playing an important part in computer projects set up around the world by volunteers. They are involved, for instance, in developing Linux—the open-source alternative to the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Projects like this give programmers the chance to take part in global technological developments.