Design of Optical Fibers for Communications Systems (BOOK CHAPTER)

The optical communications industry has seen phenomenal growth over the las few years, spurring a significant commercial market in optical components and systems. This growth has extended across all application spaces, from transoceanic and transcontinental distances to regional networks to campus and building wiring. The explosion in demand for bandwidth has been fueled by the increasing ubiquity of the Internet as more information is handled electronically, as more homes go online, and as more business is transacted over the web. The implication of this growth, however, goes beyond simply increasing the amount of information that cen be transmitted between two points. Transport of data over t he internet presents fundamentally different traffic patterns than voice traffic, which dominated telecommunications until around 1998. Voice traffic typically remains within the local or metro calling region where it was generated. In addition, since voice bandwidth requires a data rate of only 64 kbps, terabit transmission over long distances was thought unnecessary.