Feature
Recycled Fiber Optics: How Old Ideas Drove New Technology
When it comes to fiber optics, everything old is new again. Crucial building blocks of modern technology were once written off as impractical, including single-mode fiber and wavelength-division multiplexing. Now coherent communication systems, abandoned in the 1980s, have become cutting-edge high-performance systems.
George Hockham, with the metal waveguides he studied to show that small internal variations would not cause large loss in optical fibers.
Nortel and BNR Europe/Courtesy of Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Hecht Collection
Coherent communications was a hot topic at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in September 2011. The first commercial coherent systems are already at work transmitting 100 Gbits/s on a single wavelength. At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference in March of last year, Dayou Qian of NEC Laboratories reported coherent transmission of a record 101.7 Tbits/s through a single fiber core. At ECOC, Xiang Liu of Bell Labs reported that such transmission allowed spectral efficiency to reach 8.6 bits/s per hertz of bandwidth when sending 1.12 Tbits/s on a single “superchannel.”
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