Photonic Switching: Has its time come?

The staggering success of fibre optic communications forced the view that other functions of the network may be performed by optics. One of the first was photonic switching. In spite of substantial progress in the field photonic switching is of marginal importance in networks. The reason for that lies in the cost and complexity of the performance monitoring which is of fundamental importance in networks It is suggested that substantial more work is required on performance monitoring and standards in order to introduce photonic switching in networks.