Five minutes with… Village Networks Founder Kai Eng

One of the newest filet mignons on the grill of the optical-networking sector is Village Networks, led by founder, president and CEO Kai Y. Eng. Having left a distinguished research career (40 patents and an IEEE Fellow, to be precise) at Bell Labs, Eng founded Village Networks in 1998 to essentially eliminate the bottlenecks in optical networks.

TCB: How did you begin your research career?
Eng: In the beginning I was focused on transmission research. But once I recognized that all of the big problems in networking were in switching, not transmission, I changed my focus to switching.

TCB: Why the change in direction?
Eng: I was always uncomfortable with the idea that switching and transmission were separate — in other words, why push bit rate as fast as you can only to slow down when you hit the switch? You end up throwing away all the benefit of fast transmission. It’s like driving 100 mph on the highway only to end up sitting in a long line to pay the toll. It doesn’t make any sense.

I’ve always wanted to integrate the concept of switching and transmission — networking should proceed on a different paradigm and that endeavor has motivated my work. The terabit ATM switch I built was to prove that switching need not be the bottleneck of the network.

TCB: So how is Village Networks tackling this issue?
Eng: We’re not trying to build a box or trying to improve some technology. Ultimately we’re working on a new dimension, a new way of looking at networking. And to solve the networking problem, you really want to think about the end-to-end solution for the customer, not just one piece of the puzzle — switching or transmission. We’re trying to come up with a total solution for the next-gen evolution.