Fiber Optic Technology: It’s Role in Information Revolution

Everywhere on this planet, hair-thin optical fibers carry vast quantities of information from place to place. There are many desirable properties of optical fibers for carrying this information. They have enormous information-carrying capacity, are low cost, and possess immunity from the many disturbances that can afflict electrical wires and wireless communication links. The superiority of optical fibers for carrying information from places to place is leading to their rapidly replacing older technologies. Optical fibers have played a key role in making possible the extraordinary growth in world-wide communications that has occurred in the last 25 years, and are vital in enabling the proliferating use of the Internet. Keywords: Fiber optics, refractive index, claddings, attenuation, repeaters, dispersion, encoding, fiber network, architecture