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Interferometric comparison of waves is the perhaps most sensitive method in metrology: phase differences of only [] lie between the constructire superposition and the destructive extinction of two waves, and because of the very good agreement of real waves with the trigonometric functions, very small fractions of this phase difference are measurable with the help of a computational fit to the experimental data. For optical telecommunication interferometry not only provides a very precise way to characterize economical optoelectronic switching devices and may become the design principle of the future all-photonic network.