Niche Market

Optical wireless, first developed in the 1960s, is a line-of-sight technology that uses beams of light as the primary data path. Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates in Northboro, Mass., and Gartner Inc. analyst Bettina Tratz-Ryan both said the market for the technology is still small, with several vendors generating less than $200 million in annual sales globally.

But Gold and Tratz-Ryan said optical wireless can greatly reduce deployment times and offer high bandwidth at a comparatively low cost.

Sloan-Kettering has used equipment from San Diego-based LightPointe on all three of its installations. Next year, the center plans to install a fourth optical wireless connection to link end users in a 20-story research tower to its LAN, Carragee said.

Last summer's installation offers transmission speeds of 1Gbit/sec., as will the one coming in 2006. That's fast enough to support video applications used in training and psychological counseling, Carragee said. The distance covered by the optical links ranges from two to seven city blocks, or as much as a half-mile, he added.