Three technologies, developed three and a half decades ago, seeded the ongoing development of fiber to the home today.
The Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFCC) began in 1975, as a scientific conference sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS). The National Fiber Optics Engineers Conference (NFOEC) began a decade later as an optical-technology meeting sponsored by Bellcore (now Telcordia) and the newly formed Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs). Reflecting industry consolidation in the wake of the recent boom and bust cycle, the two meetings will be held together for the first time next month as OFC/NFOEC, March 6-11 in Anaheim, CA. Perhaps appropriately, the two OFC plenary talks on Tuesday, March 8, at 8 a.m., will embrace themes of glancing backward as well as focusing forward.
FIGURE 1. On Tuesday, engineers will describe a DWDM large-scale-PIC transmitter architecture in which each transmit channel consists of a tunable DFB laser with an integrated back-facet power monitor, an electro-absorption modulator, and a variable optical attenuator (VOA), used mainly for power flattening.
Donald Keck, retired vice president and research director at Corning (Corning, NY) will glance backward three and a half decades at the first Internet experiments, first room-temperature semiconductor laser demonstration, and the invention of low-loss optical fiber that came together to ultimately produce an optical telecom industry. The other plenary speaker, Hiromichi Shinohara, director of NTT Access Network Service Systems Labs (Kanagawa, Japan) will focus forward on fiber to the home (FTTH): a rapidly growing market in Japan, a primary goal for the telecommunications industry worldwide, and a well-represented topic among technical presentations at the meeting.
Tuesday highlights
During Tuesday’s technical sessions, engineers from Infinera (Sunnyvale, CA) will herald the arrival of affordable, high-speed and high-bandwidth photonic integrated circuitry (PIC) in the form of an indium phosphide-based, 10-channel transmitter and receiver dense wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) PIC pair capable of transmitting and receiving data at 40 Gbit/s per channel for an aggregate data communication rate of 400 Gbit/s (paper OTuM2; see Fig. 1). In the following talk, researchers from the University of California-Santa Barbara, will offer a possible replacement for distributed-feedback (DFB) lasers in WDM systems, in networks requiring dynamic provisioning, in phased radar systems, and in optical switching and routing, in the form of a monolithically integrated widely tunable transmitter using a series push-pull Mach-Zehnder electrode structure with a semiconductor optical amplifier and SGDBR laser suitable for 40-Gbit/s systems with tuning over 34 nm (paper OTuM3).
Also on Tuesday, engineers from Therma-Wave (Fremont, CA) and the University of Arizona (Tucson) will discuss fiber-bundle preparation methods for high-power applications (paper OTuF6). Researchers from the University of Tokyo will describe unrepeated transmission of 20‑Gbit/s quadrature phase-shift-keying (QPSK) modulation format signals over 210 km using coherent detection and digital signal processing (paper OTuL4). Corning engineers will describe the fabrication and characterization of hollow-core photonic-bandgap fiber fabricated with group birefringence of 0.025 at 1550 nm (paper OTuI1). Researchers from Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium) will discuss the use of divisible load theory to examine operational costs when connecting different sites of a computational grid in an optical-transport network (paper OTuP1); and engineers from MCI (Richardson, TX), Ciena (Linthicum, MD), and Mintera (Lowell, MA) will describe transmission of a 40-Gbit/s optical signal on a 1200-km ultra-long-haul, multispan, mixed-field fiber route from Sacramento, CA, to Salt Lake City, UT (paper OTuH4).
Wednesday highlights
On Wednesday, March 9, NTT researchers will describe the steps they have taken and continue to take as FTTH installations double from about 500,000 connections in the summer of 2004 to more than 1 million in the summer of 2005 (paper OWP2). Strategies they have implemented to reduce costs of bringing optical cables into subscriber’s homes to nearly the same cost level as for metallic lines include collocating optical fiber with metallic cabling to save space, and using fiber-reinforced plastics to provide drop-fiber tension without a need for grounding (see Fig. 2). They will also describe additional cost-cutting steps, such as the introduction of outer clasp connectors and bendable optical cable. Because video delivery is the dominant high-bandwidth application for FTTP networks, engineers from Harmonic (Sunnyvale, CA) will offer cost models, as well as qualitative comparisons, in the same session to advocate the economic advantages of a hybrid video architecture that uses RF for broadcast video and switched IP for targeted video (paper OWP4).