Author Archive

:: What is optical fiber cleaving?
Simply put, optical fiber cleaving is the art of cutting glass optical fibers at a perfect 90? angle with a mirror like surface. This isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Why do we need to cut the fiber at a perfect 90? angle at all? Well, this is required when we […]

Bit error ratio (BER) measurement is the fundamental measurement of the quality of the fiber optic communication system. It measures the system’s probability that transmitted bits will be correctly received as logic ones and zeros.
Bit error ratio is the ratio of the number of bits received incorrectly compared to the number of bits transmitted in […]

The structure of an optical receiver is simple: consisting of just a photodiode to produce the electrical current and an amplifier. But do not be fooled: it is far more complex to design a really high performance optical receiver. So we will talk about some of the criteria of actual receivers.
The are a bunch of […]

What happens if a major fiber optic cable is cut or a major hubbing location is destroyed in a fiber network? Will the whole system be brought down?
That is the subject of this article: the survivability of a well designed fiber network.
Modern fiber optic transmission systems have provided tremendous capacity for voice, video and data […]

What are fiber optic sensors?
The fundamental characteristic of all fiber optic sensors is that they depend on some optical properties, such as intensity, phase, state of polarization and wavelength, to be modulated by measurands. Measurands could be pressure, temperature, electromagnetic field or displacement.
All fiber optic sensors have an optical element that is sensing these property […]

In the last decade, a wide variety of applications have been developed that covers a dozen of datacom networking technologies. The transmission speed ranges from 10Mbits up to 10Gbit/s and growing.
High distance-bandwidth product is the major selling point for fiber optic transceivers. Another major benefit of fiber optic systems is their high reliability compared to […]

Do you know why it is so expensive to install Fiber To The Home? Why Bell companies are reluctant to deploy fiber optic network directly to consumers in a large scale?
It’s not the material cost. It’s the labor! The introduction of fiber into the subscriber loop has increased the installation of short cable lengths with […]

Why Do We Need Fiber Optic Attenuators?
A fiber optic attenuator, also called an optical attenuator, simulates the loss the would be caused by a long length of fiber. Typically, this device performs receiver testing. While an optical attenuator can simulate the optical loss of a long length of fiber, it cannot accurately simulate the dispersion […]

Understanding FTTH (Fiber To The Home)
FTTH is an all-fiber connection to the home which provides a minimum of 155Mbps bandwidth on both up stream and down stream directions. Basically, it is composed of a fiber from the service node to the optical splitter, the optical splitter which separates to (fan out) terminate on single home […]

What is all-optical switching?
All-optical switching is a process by which light, usually in the form of digital communication signals, is routed from one transmission channel to another, or modulated, without intermediate conversion to another format.
In previous technologies, the routing usually involves the following steps: detection of an optical signal, an electronic routing decision, electronic triggering […]

What is an optical circulator?
The optical circulator has similar function and design as the optical isolator. An optical circulator is an nonreciprocal passive device that directs light sequentially from port 1 to port 2, from port 2 to port 3, and so on in only one direction. The operation of a circulator is similar to […]

When testing loss in a fiber optic link, some basic principles must be kept in mind all the time.
1. The testing wavelength should always be the same as the working wavelength. Because optical fiber loss varies with light wavelength, you will get incorrect result if your measuring wavelength is different from the actual working wavelength. […]

What is WDM?
WDM is the abbreviation for Wavelength Division Multiplexing. What it does is to split the the light in an optic fiber into a number of discrete wavelengths (colors). Each wavelength (color) is a independent channel running at data rate at 2.5Gbit/s, 10Gbit/s, 40Gbit/s or even 100Gbit/s (still under development). So if the light […]

Overview of Fiber Optic Testing
There are mandatory tests for every stage of the design, manufacture, and installation of the fiber optic components, link, cable plant, and network.
Most fiber optic test procedures have been thoroughly tested and codified as industry standards. These standards are part of EIA/TIA RS455 and are being adapted into IEC standards.
Most of […]

The SONET standards were developed in the mid-1980s to take advantage of low-cost transmission over optical fibers. It defines a hierarchy of data rates, formats for framing and multiplexing the payload data, as well as optical signal specifications(wavelength and dispersion), allowing multi-vendor interoperability.
SONET is sometimes described as “T-1 on steroids”. Why is that? As we […]