Fiber Optic Essentials
Chapter One
Introduction
Optics today is responsible for many revolutions in science and technology. This
has been brought about primarily by the invention of the laser in 1960 and subsequent
development in realizing the extremely wide variety of lasers. One of the
most interesting applications of lasers with a direct impact on our lives has been in
communications. Use of electromagnetic waves in communication is quite old, and
development of the laser gave communication engineers a source of electromagnetic
waves of extremely high frequency compared to microwaves and millimeter waves.
The development of low-loss optical fibers led to an explosion in the application of
lasers in communication, and today we are able to communicate almost instantaneously
between any two points on the globe. The backbone network providing this
capability is based on optical fibers crisscrossing the Earth: under the seas, over land,
and across mountains. Today, more than 10 terabits of information can be transmitted
per second through one hair-thin optical fiber. This amount of information is ... read full excerpt from Fiber Optic Essentials ebook
