By Scott Schaefer

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of Burienites have just lounged around gaining weight, binge-watching too much TV, doing online Zoom meetings, or working on work/home/yard projects.

But a 24-year old Burien resident named John Paul Hansen has done something a bit different – in his garage during the COVID-19 lockdown, he put his inventive nature to the test in the development of a patent pending, revolutionary new kind of hardware designed for high-speed optical networking, called the ‘Axon.’

Burien inventor John Paul Hansen

The Axon transmits multiple signals at once with zero loss of bandwidth no matter how many signals are present.

In other words, its a screaming fast data transfer thingamajig, kind of like a router only much more advanced.

“Axon is truly revolutionary, as it is like no other hardware available today,” Hansen told The B-Town Blog.

Hansen lives in the Seahurst neighborhood of Burien, and attended schools here.

“I went to the University of Idaho (Go Vandals!), Raisbeck Aviation High School (shout out to Ms. Gilman and Ms. Pappas!), Sylvester Middle School (shout out to Ms. Fisher!), and Holy Family in White Center (shout out to Mr. Morissette!),” Hansen said.

Plans for the Axon include using it in hospitals that use data centers to make them faster, and become more resistant to bottlenecks.

He has also reached out to the NASA consortium office at the University of Idaho to see how they could use it.

“Additionally, I have determined that the Axon is fast enough to run a simple stock trading bot — and it has the ability to make trades with less latency than any other machine on the market, which is something we are very excited about,” he added.

And finally, after eight years of investigating and inventing, he and his team are all ready to go into distribution.

“It’s just a matter of enacting our operations plan and getting word out about our machine.”

The Axon passed its initial tests with flying colors, and is immediately available for industrial testing and full scale implementation within any U.S. Data Center.

“We believe the Axon has the potential to change the world, and it was developed right here in our hometown!” he added,

Way to go John, and thanks for sharing your inventive creation with B-Town!

If none of the above tech jargon makes sense, here’s a video that might help clarify things:

Here’s more from Axon:

From appearances alone, it is clear the Axon is something new. On an optical breadboard, which is densely covered with state-of-the-art fiber cables, chemically-treated beam splitters, and lasers, the Axon is stacked like a child’s building blocks. It features cherry red paint on the edges, and a laser engraved company logo on the broad sides. Inside are little plastic cartridges that can be removed, rotated and swapped for others like collectable toys; but this unassuming exterior hides the fact that the Axon is a powerful and unique optical tool that provides network engineers with a level of control and freedom that has (until now) been out of reach.

“The Axon is a passive product that works in tandem with fiber launchers to overlap and organize multiple beams of light, no matter the speed, protocol, or direction of the data they carry,” said John Paul Hansen, Co-Founder and CEO of Axon Optics LLC. “

A fiber launcher is common in university research labs but not data centers, and can stream information at gigabit speeds by collimating and projecting contents of a fiber optic cable as a beam of light that streams through open air, much like a laser. As a result, a network engineer could overlap and simultaneously transmit several already-multiplexed signals at once –and do so with a miniscule fraction of the latency that even the fastest network switches would require today. That is why the Axon is revolutionary. The value comes from the substantial reduction in latency, on top of adding an additional layer of multiplexing and control.”

As any data center expert would confirm, network latency is expensive. Reducing latency by even one millisecond can represent a savings of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over the course of a year –but the ability to reduce latency has not been practical in the industry because of the natural speed limitations of electronic switches. Until now. The Axon improves the state of the art by using optics instead.

“Now, network latency is a gold mine. The Axon refines even the highest-speed data centers using beams of light.”

For more info, visit www.axonopticsllc.com.