A Historical View of Fiber Data Communications*
When I wrote the first edition of Understanding Fiber Optics in 1987, fiber had recently become the backbone of the North American telecommunications network, where it transmitted 417 Mb/s through single-mode fiber. Developers were working on the next generation to transmit 1.7 Gb/s on land. The laying of the first transatlantic fiber cable, TAT-8, was a year away. Local area networks did not need fiber at their 1987 data rates of 1–10 Mb/s, but developers had hopes for the coming generation of 100-Mb/s transmission. Fiber-to-the-home systems had been demonstrated to groups of 150 homes in Japan and Canada, but were far too costly for general installations.
Today state-of-the-art backbone networks ...
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