Up in Yonkers, where, Lorenz Hart avers, true love conquers in the wilds, Codenoll Technology Corp is very excited about the results of a six-year joint development with the Packard Electric Division of General Motors Corp, which has resulted in the perfection of Plastic Optical Fibre for use in local area networks. The New York company wants the world to know the stuff as POF, but we’ll stick to plastic fibre around here; more importantly, Codenoll declares that it has been designed to designed to obsolete both coax and twisted pair wiring in local networks, insisting that it will be less expensive, easier to install and easier to test than either shielded or unshielded twisted pair, while providing the higher performance and reliability associated with optical fibre technology. The company has demonstrated the stuff running an IEEE-802.3 Ethernet-compliant network, and shown that it can also support 100Mbps Fibre Distributed Data Interface and 100Mbps to 300Mbps Metropolitan Area Networks just by changing adaptor cards. No indication of the fabrication technique or how the cable compares with conventional glass fibre, but Codenoll hopes to announce products using the new technology any day.
