President's Message
Reflecting on 50 Years of Fiber Optics
The growth rate in bit-rate–distance (BL) product—a commonly used figure of merit for communication systems—soared with the deployment of optical fiber, beginning in the late 1970s. [G. Agrawal, “Optical communication: Its history and recent progress,” in Optics in Our Time, M.D. Al-Amri et al., eds. (Springer, 2016); CC-BY 4.0.] [Enlarge figure]
The laser and low-loss optical fibers have had an effect far beyond what most could imagine.
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