We all remember ~twenty five years ago when the EE community, and especially academia, decided that Digital was the future, and abandoned Analog. 

And for that mistake, we have spent the last ~15 years playing Catch-Up!

I fear we are making the same mistake all over again with Optical Technology.

At last count, universities seem to either ignore Optical, or they run out and buy a hand full of lasers and a very expensive optical bench with accessories; and they either let it gather dust, or let the artsi folks from the Design School make holograms with it. 

Few seem yet to be taking it seriously. 

Data transport using Soliton Pulses in Dispersion-Shifted Fiber
   Single Fiber: Errorless data transmission: 50 Gb/s, at over 19,000 km, No Repeaters

This technology is no longer a laboratory oddity, but has been in place and Growing for the last > 6 years.

   Undersea Fiber Optic Cable:  TAT-14  (map)

   The 15,000-mile cable, which incorporates dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) with 16 wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber pair, will operate at a protected capacity of 640Gbps, with a total capacity of 1.3 Tbps; enough to transmit the content of more than 400 full length movie DVD disks every second: that is 1 DVD for every man, woman, and child on earth in less than 6 months.

Repeaters that amplify light using Erbium-doped Fiber Light Amplifier  EDFA
   40 THz bandwidth (12.5⁶ bibles/sec)

10 Fsec pulses from Erbium-doped Fiber LASER
Pulse widths ~ 10 Femtoseconds (10 ^-15 sec)
Light travels 1/8th the thickness of a sheet of paper.
10 Fsec is to one second as one second is to 3.2 million years.

The next generation of computing--Optical Computing, will have CPU operations and bus speeds measured in THz, data paths >>1024 bytes wide. Logic operations will occur in �optical space� as Soliton wave packets interact algebraically--the operations happen outside of silicon. The hardware: sub-micron LASERS communicating across sub-micron space, both transferring and processing data, stored in Terra-Byte optical storage. ^[*^]

There is a relatively new fiber optic data transmission scheme that utilizes something called Soliton Pulses. These are very short bursts of light generated in an Erbium-doped Fiber LASER. Soliton light can be used to transmit data at rates in excess of 50 Gb/s, at distances over 19,000 km of Dispersion-Shifted Fiber, requiring no repeaters, and with no errors. This data rate is the equivalent of sending 6,200 bibles per second. At this rate, one bible could be sent to everyone on earth--6 ⁹ people--in about 10 days. 

Light Amplifiers
In the case of repeaters, in a long-haul fiber: instead of converting the light into electrical signals, amplifying, correcting errors, retiming and retransmitting light pulses for the next 20 km span, an optical amplifier is used. It consists of about 30 meters of Erbium-doped fiber, assorted filters and beam splitters, and pumped by a 15 mW LASER diode operating at 1550 nm. This arrangement adds about 30 dB of gain with no appreciable noise. Also, the bandwidth of this amplifier is on the order of 40 THz. At this rate, one bible could be sent to everyone on earth, 5.5 9 people, in about 18 minutes. 

The Shortest LASER pulse, to date, is <10 Femtoseconds (10 ^-15 sec). Light would travel 1/8th the thickness of a sheet of paper in that time. 

1 Fsec is to one second as one second is to 32 million years. 
 

[_*]Forecasting the future of technology is a Fool's Errand.