(FORTUNE Magazine) – When it comes to the mirrors in optical switches, small is all. That's because the smaller the mirrors, the more of them you can cram into a single switch, making it possible to route ever more optical signals from fiber to fiber. Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies' upcoming WaveStar LambdaRouter switch takes things tinier than ever, using nanotechnology to build mirrors only a few hundred microns, or about half a millimeter, across. (Both the mirrors and the needle below have been magnified to make them more visible). The result? The switch will be able to handle up to 1,024 signals, transmitting at 40 gigs per second--about 16 times faster than today's switches. One single Lambda switch, Lucent boasts, could handle all the traffic on the Internet simultaneously. As spokesman Saswato Das puts it, "It's fast, it's cheap, and it's robust.... We're coming to the point where we're going to have a bandwidth bottleneck, and this is a way to help prevent it."

--C.T.