What are the problems we are solving by optical switching?

There is no question that optics will more and more displace electronics in any aspect of transport even in back-plane and board-to-board connections. But will photons eventually replace electrons in switching and routing? Optical switches do not, in general, make bit-by-bit decisions but rather route entire bit-stream without looking inside the data and as a consequence they have two inherent advantages over electronic switches: they have almost unlimited throughput bandwidth and their power consumption is low. However, the flipside of this analog nature of optical switches is that they cannot verify, modify or fully regenerate the data they are switching and these deficiencies have so far prevented their widespread use. In this talk, we will review some of the functionality trade-offs and give an outlook of where we believe optical switching will most likely make major inroads in the near future.