Optical Communication

Optical communication has become the key enabler of the World Wide Web. High speed trunk line connections already transport Terabits of information. As the demand for transmission capacity grows with exponential figures, new challenges are put forward to increase the transmission capacity at least with three orders of magnitude. In the meanwhile fiber optics penetrates buildings, offices and the premises of local residents offering bandwidths up to 1 Gbit/s and more. These application domains require low cost solutions with cheap easy-to-handle fibre network solutions featuring polymer fibres in combination with advanced data formats. At last, cars and airplanes take more and more advantage of fibre optic data planes for leasure, monitoring and control (fly-by-wire).