Fiber Optic Communication

 

Fiber Optic Communication

Tracy Nguyen

Fiber optic communication has not only impact in the telecommunications industry but also in the data networking community. Optical fibers can be used to transmit light and information over long distances with much lower level of loss in the transmission and higher data rates.  Fiber-based systems have largely replaced radio transmitter systems.

Fiber optic mostly used for telephony, Internet traffic, long high-speed local area networks (LANs), cable TV (CATV), and for shorter distances within buildings.

Silica fibers are most common use for long distances

In short distances, plastic optical fibers can be advantageous.

Compared with systems based on electrical cables, the approach of optical fiber communications (lightwave communications) has advantages, the most important of which are:

• The capacity of fibers for data transmission is huge: a single silica fiber can carry hundreds of thousands of telephone channels
• The losses for light propagating in fibers are very small: ≈ 0.2 dB/km for modern single-mode silica fibers, so that many tens of kilometers can be bridged without amplifying the signals.
• Compared with electrical cables, fiber-optic cables are very lightweight.
• Fiber-optic cables are immune to problems that arise with electrical cables, such as ground loops or electromagnetic interference (EMI).

Mostly due to their very high data transmission capacity, fiber-optic transmission systems can achieve a much lower cost than systems based on coaxial copper cables, if high data rates are needed.

How optical fiber works

  

MultiMode vs. SingleMode Fiber Optic Cable

Fiber Laser:

References:
Optical Fiber Communications 
https://www.rp-photonics.com/optical_fiber_communications.html 

Femtosecond laser glass processing:
https://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=51733