Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501240007
SECTION: ECONOMY PAGE: ENRV-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Or at least potential gold, as more than a dozen firms in the region pursue a piece of a fiber-optic future with applications here and abroad.
Because of work done at Virginia Tech, the New River Valley is a well-known center of research into fiber optics. Tech, which funded 40 graduate students in the field last year, has the largest fiber-optics teaching program in the country, according to the Optical Society of America.
Practical applications and commercial firms, though, are small, but growing, players in the local economy.
New River Community College, for one, anticipates more and more jobs in fiber optics this decade, as part of the anticipated move toward interactive video, voice and data transmission. That should spur more of a demand for training.
This fall, the community college is launching a two-year speciality degree program in fiber optics. It will focus on the theory behind lasers, optics and fiber optics, but mainly on hands-on training in installation, splicing and connection techniques, according to Joe Cochran, a professor at the Dublin-based school.
Under some future scenarios, fiber-optic lines, which can carry more data faster than traditional copper wire, would allow people to order services, speak, write and transmit images between homes and businesses. Those transmissions could be local or global.
In this region, there are two high-profile, public-private experiments testing those ideas: the second-generation electronic classrooms expected to open this fall in Montgomery County and Radford; and the still-evolving Blacksburg Electronic Village.
Telecommunications advocates, such as Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, expect the two-way trend to reach the region's secondary schools and colleges within the decade, and homes later on.
"Sooner or later this is going to be a capability," said Cochran, a professor of industrial electricity at New River Community College. "We're expecting a real increase in services and somebody's going to need to do the connecting."
The college's new program is the result of a prototype course developed over the last four years, and a $106,000 grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission to build a laboratory at the Dublin college. Boucher requested the grant for the new two-year program, which will start training its first 16 students in the fall.
That would make it a practical complement to the research at Tech.
Since 1986, the Fiber & Electro-Optics Research Center - one of four technology development centers at Tech affiliated with the state Center for Innovative Technologies - has been at work exploring and refining new technologies. It has licensed 17 patents and had a budget of approximately $2.5 million last year.
The center survives on government money and research contracts, such as a multiyear, basic optical science research project under way for the Navy, said Richard Claus, center founder and director. Since its start, the center has brought $20 million in research money into the local economy, while receiving about $2 million in state money, Claus said. Proposed state budget cuts worry him. "If the CIT gets cut, on a rough guess, it might cut our program in half."
One of the researchers at the center, Kent Murphy, also founded a small Christiansburg company, Fiber & Sensor Technologies, with Claus. The company began in 1990 to make and sell specialized instrumentation based solely on government-sponsored research, Claus said. It holds four of the patents developed through the center, including fiber-optic sensors that monitor sensitive, detailed manufacturing processes. Their company has 15 employees and is to move to a new building in the Blacksburg Industrial Park this spring.
The fiber-optics field has been steadily expanding, but not at the speed of neighboring North Carolina, for instance, Murphy said. There, the state has invested heavily in laying fiber-optic test beds, on the assumption that widespread networks are coming soon. "The state of Virginia is really in a wait-and-see mode," he said.
But there are at least two prominent, public experiments locally using fiber-optic lines and new communications technology.
Students in two Montgomery County high schools will be direct beneficiaries of the newer of the two: an effort to link two high schools with Virginia Western Community College and Radford University in a network of interactive, electronic classrooms. It's part of a push that Boucher started two years ago to link the 83 high schools, community colleges and four-year colleges in the 9th District together with fiber-optic lines. Twenty-one are scheduled to be on-line this fall.
Bell Atlantic is donating $165,200 here, part of $1 million it has given statewide for fiber-optic links between schools. Among other features, the program will allow students in rural schools to have access to advanced classes they might not otherwise been able to take.
The second major experiment is the Blacksburg Electronic Village, a partnership between Tech, Bell Atlantic and Blacksburg. It uses fiber-optic technology in selected apartment complexes in Blacksburg to give high-speed access to the Internet. Most users, however, use traditional telephone lines.
The village, which provides low-cost access to the worldwide computer network, is designed in part to see how financially feasible it would be to build a widespread network using fiber-optic lines.
by CNB