Electrical and optical components are being created that can be flexibly interconnected to meet the needs of a wide range of emerging business customers. The electrical components are based on a versatile, high-speed electronic-bus architecture that can simultaneously transport voice, data, and video signals, synchronously or asynchronously, at multi-gigabit-per-second data rates. Port cards can reserve bus bandwidth for synchronous circuit connections, and can contend for asynchronous bandwidth to send packets. A high-speed optical network interconnects these electronic switches. As data-rate requirements increase to multi-gigabit-per-second transfer rates, optical switches can be used to form distributed broadband networks that span buildings, campuses, and corporations. Inherent data rate and protocol transparency makes optical switches ideal for networking a wide variety of information sources.