Optical Fiber Communication: Important Discovery in History

Optical Fiber Communication : Important Discovery in History

Here is a brief summary to understand why.

I will try to simplify the terms and the concepts as much as possible so that everybody can understand. My apology for those with high knowledge about the subject. Links can be found at the end.

Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of light through an optical fiber. The light forms an electromagnetic carrier wave that is modulated to carry information. First developed in the 1970s, fiber-optics have revolutionized the telecommunications industry and have played a major role in the advent of the Information Age. Because of its advantages over electrical transmission, optical fibers have largely replaced copper wire communications in core networks in the developed world. Optical fiber is used by many telecommunications companies to transmit telephone signals, Internet communication, and cable television signals. Researchers at Bell Labs have reached internet speeds of over 100 petabit×kilometer per second using fiber-optic communication.

The process of communicating using fiber-optics involves the following basic steps: Creating the optical signal involving the use of a transmitter, relaying the signal along the fiber, ensuring that the signal does not become too distorted or weak, receiving the optical signal, and converting it into an electrical signal.

Fiber Optics, How it works??

The story of using light as a means for communication started with the Photophone of Alexander Graham Bell.

Graham Bell

A Photophone receiver and headset, one half of Bell and Tainter's optical telecommunication system of 1880

Of the eighteen (18) patents granted in Bell's name alone, and the twelve (12) he shared with his collaborators, four (4) were for the Photophone, which Bell referred to as his 'greatest achievement', writing that the Photophone was "the greatest invention [I have] ever made, greater than the telephone".

Alexander Graham Bell, in a letter to his father Alexander Melville Bell, dated February 26, 1880

“I have heard articulate (clear) speech by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!”

“...I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk. You are the grandfather of the Photophone and I want to share my delight at my success.

One of the Largest Man Made Projects

Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) is a 28,000-kilometer-long optical fiber mostly-submarine communications cable that connects the United Kingdom, Japan, and many places in between. The cable is operated by Global Cloud Xchange. The system runs from the eastern coast of North America to Japan. Its Europe-Asia segment was the fourth longest cable in the world in 2008.

Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe

Internet users per 100 inhabitants

Internet users in 2012 as a percentage of a country's population

Number of Internet users in 2012

Internet Traffic Report

http://www.internettrafficreport...

List of virtual communities with more than 100 million active users

Here is a very nice video that shows how it works.

Fiber optic cables: How they work

Connectivity

"Father of Fiber Optics"

Charles Kuen Kao, known as the "Godfather of Broadband"

Kao was born in Shanghai, China in 1933

Kao holds dual citizenship of the United Kingdom and the United States.

He did his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering at Woolwich Polytechnic (now the University of Greenwich), obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree.

He then pursued research and received his PhD degree in electrical engineering in 1965 from University College London (under Professor Harold Barlow) as an external student while working at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, England, the research centre of Standard Telephones and Cables

Kao joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 1970, to found the Department of Electronics, which later became the Department of Electronic Engineering.

Initially Kao worked in the team of Antoni E. Karbowiak (aka Toni Karbowiak), who was working under Alec Reeves to study optical waveguides for communications. Kao's task was to investigate fiber attenuation, for which he collected samples from different fiber manufacturers and also investigated the properties of bulk glasses carefully. Kao's study primarily convinced himself that the impurities in material caused the high light losses of those fibers

Charles Kao showed an early fascination with the properties of sand.

Although Kao succeeded Karbowiak as manager of optical communications research, he immediately decided to abandon Karbowiak's plan (thin-film waveguide) and overall change research direction with his colleague George Hockham. They not only considered optical physics but also the material properties. The results were first presented by Kao to the IEE in January 1966 in London. This study first theorized and proposed to use glass fibers to implement optical communication, the ideas (especially structural features and materials) described are largely the basis of today's optical fiber communications.

However, at the time of this determination, optical fibers commonly exhibited light loss as high as 1,000 dB/km and even more. This conclusion opened the intense race to find low-loss materials and suitable fibers for reaching such criteria.

In 1965, the then young scientist Charles Kao doing an early experiment on optical fibers at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, U.K.

When Kao first proposed that such glass fiber could be used for long-distance information transfer and could replace copper wires which were used for telecommunication during that era, his ideas were widely disbelieved; later people realized that Kao's ideas revolutionized the whole communication technology and industry.

In 1969, Kao with M.W. Jones measured the intrinsic loss of bulk-fused silica at 4 dB/km, which is the first evidence of ultra-transparent glass. Bell Labs started considering fiber optics seriously.

Honors and awards

IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award (1978)

IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1985)

Marconi Prize (1985)

C&C Prize (1987)

Faraday Medal (1989)

James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials (1989)

SPIE Gold Medal (1992)

Prince Philip Medal (1996)

Japan Prize (1996)

3463 Kaokuen (1996)

Charles Stark Draper Prize (1999)

Asian of the Century (1999)

Nobel Prize in Physics (2009)

Grand Bauhinia Medal (2010)

He was awarded half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"