Optical Fiber Meets the Growing Telecommunications Demand

Alan Evans, Venkata Bhagavatula, George Berkey, V. Srikant, Corning Inc.

The public's voracious appetite for email and the Internet is fueling an explosion in the demand for information capacity over the backbone optical transmission network. Data traffic that 10 years ago was approximately 5 percent of total bandwidth now nearly equals voice traffic. Ten years from now it will rise to 95 percent. This bandwidth demand is being met by three key technologies: Erbium-doped fiber optic amplifiers, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and dispersion compensation.