Happy Birthday, Optical Fiber

This year is a milestone for communications, marking the 50th birthday for fiber optics. Communications networks, whether in a data center or to the home, now rely heavily on fiber. Dave Tanis gives a short fiber optics history lesson and shares the innovations that resulted from the birth of this key communication technology.

Fiber_Support_imageWhen was optical fiber first conceived? Was it when Snell’s Law was formulated, leading to the concept of refractive indexes? Or when Bell invented the photophone? While these concepts helped advance fiber optics, many would point to Dr. Charles Kao's pivotal research, presented in 1966 to the Institute of Electrical Engineers, as the defining moment in fiber optics - for which Dr. Kao was awarded a well-deserved Nobel prize. That means optical fiber is 50 years old this year!

Along with advances in optoelectronics, fiber technology has quietly enabled much of what we take for granted today, such as the Internet, high speed video and even mobile networks, all of which rely heavily on fiber backbones to ensure high quality of service. Fiber technology enables significantly lower-cost, higher capacity bandwidth at much greater distances than other media, such as coax, microwave and satellite, ever could.

Before fiber technology, bandwidth was scarce and expensive. All kinds of schemes, such as robbed bit signaling and bit compression multiplexing, were used to try to squeeze out as much bandwidth as possible from the previous backbone network technologies. Ongoing improvements in fiber optics continue to lower what is commonly referred to as the “cost per bit per kilometer” -- significantly reducing bandwidth costs to the point that all of the broadband services we have today could be delivered cost-effectively.

We at CommScope are very proud of the role we have played in bringing fiber optics to the telecommunications network: whether providing next generation wide-band multimode fiber in data centers, high density optical distribution frames for fiber-to-the-home, or fiber-to-the-antenna solutions, we continue to generate innovative solutions for our customers that are based on optical fiber technology. We've made it much easier to connect to the fiber superhighway.

At 50 years old, is fiber looking for early retirement? Not by a long shot! Innovation continues in core fiber technology and connectivity, and we look forward to developing new fiber-based innovations to keep ahead of the global need for more bandwidth.