Colleges Are Watching Carefully as Optical-Network Devices Hit the Market

By FLORENCE OLSEN

Many colleges may never have a demand for the kind of optical-network capacity that S. J. Ben Yoo and his students are devising in their lab at the University of California at Davis.

"Most campuses, even when Napster is running full bore, don't need anywhere near that," says Scott Bradner, a technology consultant at Harvard...