I will present  a possible alternative to BCH codes for optical
communications networks where high rates are desirable and  
correction of 3 or fewer errors is sufficient.
The codes are defined by evaluating polynomials in two variables at
points of the plane over a small field GF($2^s$), yielding codes of
length $2^{2s}$.  Using a few tricks, we can make the redundancy
nearly the same as that for a BCH code of the same length while having
the advantage of computations over a much smaller field.