LOVE and Ghost, this is frustrating to me, because I don't see how we can possibly be at the same "place" in development as all those other times. Let me just give it one more shot here - my hope being not just that I'm right, but that I'm more clear. (Maybe you'll even add to your positions A LITTLE and feel great about that real soon:)
Believing the releases, I think this is the first time we've had functioning devices in hand (the hardware gadgets), worked with Tier 1's by plugging them in, so to speak, where they would want them plugged in and also tweaked them a bit to meet their specs satisfactorily to show they do work as the Tier 1 desires and meet what are now considered the required minimal standards we've just been reading about. I don't see this as "material" testing; I see it as gadget testing, or "trials" to use maybe a better word. (When do you see this as ever having happened before? Seriously, I don't know all the history like you do and would like to know.)
In the simplest analogy I see the the specialized polymer (the "goo") to be part of the device like the "cream" in an Oreo cookie. Facebook doesn't want the thing to be round, they want it to be oval, so we've changed the shape of the wafers on them, but they still have the same material for the cream that works the same way to transmit light inside it and make the switch between light signals and electronic signals. They want two glass fiber connections for each wafer instead of just one... O.K... we've done that. (Richard and jeunke and some others are laughing, but I can take it.)
Maybe we've not agreed on a price per gadget, say a modulator, and so we don't have a deal with Facebook, but we do have modulators that Facebook and we, together, have verified can do the job in whatever hybrid photonics set-up Facebook is looking for. At the right price, we're in business tomorrow.
Now, the cream we'll be messing with in the labs forever, maybe not forever for modulators, but for other applications, like maybe quantum computing? The development and material testing of that stuff is the extremely complex testing that requires the clean rooms and the specialized equipment that has had to be specially developed just for this, the testing running to 5,000 hrs, etc. The way I read the latest PR is that this sort of material testing has now been completed again - and this time we've shown we've got a new cream we can tout as being the ultimate for modulators in terms of photostability. Squirting that stuff in between the wafers instead of the old stuff is NOT a big deal. We'll do it in what we already designed with Facebook, and Facebook will run some trials, and Lebby & Co. and you and I probably won't have a very long wait for completion and verification. (It may not even be necessary for first sales, since the old stuff works fine enough for right now for applications without that highest intensity infrared light?)
What I think has happened again and again, through the agonizing history you two are referring to, is repeated claims of new and improved "cream," maybe verified wonderfully in some kind(s) of generic prototype gadgetry (whoopee! as "proto" has shouted for all those years), which worked at LWLG's end well enough for that purpose (and for convincing you to buy more shares), but NOT EVER designed with and specifically FOR any potential buyer for real-world,successful trials of some particular modulator in some data center or wherever - like what seems has happened now.
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