Advances in high-speed communications on and off the Internet

The lectures will review some of the basics of data communication and some of the underlying constraints on effective high speed transmission. With this background, several current developments in practical high speed data transmission will be reviewed, including Gigabit Ethernet. Real-world limits on achieved throughput on all scales up to that of the world-wide Internet will be discussed, along with new techniques being developed to cope with massive traffic scaling on the Internet. Finally, we will look at what may lie ahead in all-optical data networks.