World Wide Packets Debuts Newest Technology Two Products On Display At Annual Las Vegas Trade Show

Sending 30 workers to the Comdex show in Las Vegas this week, World Wide Packets of Spokane is hardly hiding its fiber-optic photons under a bushel.

The company’s technology - which uses high-speed fiber-optic wires to send data - is competing to catch the attention of investors, product developers and thousands of potential customers.

One of more than 2,300 exhibitors at the weeklong Las Vegas trade show, the Spokane start-up firm is showcasing two key products - a distribution unit and an end-user “subscriber” unit to deliver high-speed data over fiber-optical networks.

The subscriber unit - SDU - debuted earlier this year and is being tested by the Grant County Public Utility District at several homes and businesses in Ephrata.

The device uses “gigabit over ethernet” protocols and can easily achieve speeds 200 times what net surfers get with 56K modems. Ethernet is a network system that allows computers to send and receive data simultaneously.

Gigabit ethernet would be very high-speed data delivery. Daines and others expect to achieve speeds of 10,000 megabits per second - more than 2,000 times faster than most cable modems.

The second unit getting an informal shakedown is World Wide Packet’s central distribution unit.

That device will serve as an area manager for about 200 subscriber units - serving as a traffic manager for data to and from a neighborhood of homes or groups of businesses using the SDUs.

WWP President Bernard Daines said Comdex is a critical arena to prove his company’s value to others in the tech industry. More than 100,000 computer industry personnel attend the trade show.

“It’s the place where people are looking for these kinds of services, and the place where potential customers will be.

“It’s a good place to start the buzz about the capabilities of our products,” Daines said.

The World Wide Packets group will also demonstrate how its equipment enables high-definition streaming video with exceptional quality and speed.

Those demonstrations are in collaboration with 2netFX, a Silicon Valley company that has developed high-resolution video that can be delivered over standard computer screens.

The demonstration of 2netFX’s streaming video with World Wide Packet equipment will produce high-definition TV without the need for high-priced HDTV sets, said Daines.

Over time, Daines and others predict that fiber-optic networks will become the broadband standard, capable of delivering TV, video-on-demand, regular phone service, and assorted other special features all over one line into homes and businesses.

In the business world, fiber-optic promoters say hospitals, schools and major companies will rely on that technology to deliver video conferences, instant medical diagnoses and a menu of rich data services.

World Wide Packets expects the SDU and the central management units to be commercially available next year, said Daines.

Prices will vary depending on the type of units and specific features.