EVERY phone call or Internet data transfer requires electrical switches to send it to the right place. But this slows everything down, especially optical signals. The only way to speed things up is to use light rather than electrons to control where the signals go.
When an optical signal reaches a telephone exchange, the signal has to be “translated” into electricity before it can be sent to its destination—your phone, for example. But the delay in converting from light to electricity, and then back to light again, slows the network down. So the race is on to make telephone exchange…
