Laggy Communication via Satellites?
Driving the first photonics boom of the late 1990s was the initiative to replace costly, laggy, and limited satellite telecom links, based on radio frequency (RF) signals with long-haul optical fiber cables running across oceans and continents. Readers of a certain age will remember the days when a long-distance phone call was not only costly but annoying: there was often a perceptible pause between a caller’s utterance and its delivery to the recipient, and vice versa. This was because the call was routed via satellite and the geostationary satellites like 1962’s Telstar
1 were so distant that the transit time from earth base-station to satellite and back was easily perceptible. Capacity was limited, per-minute pricing was high, and data-rates as we have come to think of them were truly in the Stone Age.