Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Event
Description
1954
1961
Laser transmission through fiber optics
Elias Snitzer and Will Hicks of American Optical demonstrate a laser beam directed
through a thin glass fiber.
1966
1970
Semiconductor lasers
1972
Donald Keck, Peter Schultz and Robert Maurer at Corning develop vapor deposition
method to make high purity low loss fibers
1973
Ethernet
Ethernet was invented at Xerox Palo Alto Research Labs using coax cable. Digital
Equipment joined Xerox to standardize Ethernet under IEEE as 803.3 in 1983.
1975
Semiconductor lasers
Connecting computers
1976
CATV fiber link trials
Teleprompter tests fiber optic CATV
link in Manahattan
1977
chicago
April: AT&T installs first telecom link in coal tunnels under Chicago, Illinois
(left)
3 weeks later, GTE sends live telephone calls through fiber in Long Beach, CA
1978
Fiber to the home trials begun Japan and France, costs were very high
1979
Integrated circuit (IC) PCM codecs and SLICs introduced that allow inexpensive
conversion of telephone lines to digital, paving way for fiber optics.
1980
Xerox, the inventor, joined Intel and computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corp.
to publish first standard for Ethernet. IEEE would take over standardization for
Ethernet and publish the first standard in 1983.
1980
1980-1984
fo
1980s
1982
1983
IEEE published Ethernet Standard under committee 802.3 after taking over from
Xerox, Intel and DEC. Ethernet became the dominant LAN and Internet standard.
In 1983, AT&T Bell Labs tested the first undersea fiber optic cable in ~5km deep
water in the Atlantic. (Video)
1984
D4 connector
BT Installs First Submarine Cable
Kyocera introduces ceramic ferrules for connectors that are precise enough for
singlemode fiber. The NEC D4 connector was probably the first connector to use the
ceramic ferrule. ST and SC follow.
BT lays first submarine cable to carry commercial traffic to the Isle of Wight and
a year later BT installs a cable from England to Belgium
1984
IBM introduces Token Ring network for LANs at 4Mb/s with ring architecture and a 3-
byte “token” to allow access. Standardized by IEEE as 802.5 in 1989.
1984
DEC VAXstation Graphic Terminal introduced with fiber optic link to VAX computer
for bandwidth/length requirements
1984
fo
Raytheon develops the fiber optic guided missile (FOG-M) controlled by a two-way
fiber optic data link. The fiber is payed out from a bobbin in the back of the
missile.
1985
SONET/SDH
Standards work begins on synchronous optical networks for fiber optics, SONET in US
and SDH internationally. Eventually superseded by carrier Ethernet.
1987
FOIRL (Fiber Optic Inter-Repeater Link) becomes first standard fiber optic LAN (!
EEE 802.3d) It is followed by 10baseFL/FB/FP in 1993.
1988
Undersea cables
Test
EvolutionNext
DFB Laser
AT&T lays TAT-8, first transatlantic fiber optic cable. It lasts for 13 years.
General Optronics introduces AM CATV fiber optic system, first affordable CATV
fiber system, leads to hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) CATV networks.
Distributed feedback (DFB) laser invented by Herwig Kogelnik of Bell Labs years
earlier finally becomes commercially available - it's narrow linewidth and stable
wavelength makes longer distance and WDM possible.
1990
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN develops basis for WWW: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML),
Hyptertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Uniform Resource Locator, URL. That same
year, Berners-Lee posted the first web page on what he called the World Wide Web.
1991
What we now call structured cabling developed using balanced transmission over
twisted pair phone wires and modular phone connectors for 10Mb/s Ethernet with a
fiber optic option. Standardized by TIA 568 in 1991. Adopted internationally as
ISO/IEC 11801 in 1995.
1993
WWW Browser
FDDI Connector
Marc Andreessen, at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, developed the
first web browser, Mosaic. The Internet is ready for take-off!
10base-FP (Fiber Passive) Ethernet LAN based on a passive splitter approved as IEEE
802.3J – first standard passive optical network using passive star coupler
FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) becomes first commercial 100Mb/s LAN using
dual ring architecture. Part of the ANSI standard is a unique FDDI duplex
connector.
1994
1995
FOA logo
Hybrid Fiber-Coax Fiber Networks for CATV/Broadband
The inventions of DFB lasers and cable modems allows CATV companies to build hybrid
fiber-coax networks capable of broadband service to subscribers.
IEEE 802.3 standardizes several versions of 100Mb/s Ethernet using twisted pair and
fiber optics.
1997
Using cable modems and hybrid fiber coax networks, CATV systems begin offering
fast, always-on Internet service, dominating the market for broadband.
1995-2001
The advent of the Internet and deregulation of the US telecom market led to an
overgrown market – a bubble – that burst in 2001.
1996
WDM
University of Bath demonstrates hollow core fibers where light is guided by the
structure of the fiber not the refractive index of the core and cladding.
1997
Data Centers
The growth of the Internet and the need to store and distribute vast amounts of
data leads to the design of giant data centers around the world.
1998
Fiber U Online
fiber U
Gigabit Ethernet Fiber LAN
Gigabit Ethernet using short wavelength VCSEL sources introduced. Twisted pair
versions follow.
Kevin Ashton of P&G and later MIT coined the term Internet of Things to describe
the concept of connected devices
1999
MPO
MPO to 12 ST connectors
2000
3G Cellular
wireless
OS2 low water peak singlemode fiber allowed coarse wavelength division multiplexing
(CWDM) over a broad wavelength range.
2001
The dotcom/fiber optic bubble of the late 1990s burst in 2001 causing a 70% decline
in the fiber optic industry that took nearly a decade to recover. The bust also
left much dark fiber, as much as 90% of that installed in the prior 5 years.
2002
TIA standardizes OM3 multimode fiber with higher bandwidth than regular 50/125
fibers for faster networks.
2002
tr
It took only another 4 years to increase fiber optic Ethernet speeds 10 times to
10G – and introduce pluggable modules for transceivers
2004
EPON standard LAN used for FTTH
2005
FiOS
2008
ITU-T G.984 BPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) standardized. Since introduction
it has been updated several times to include 10G PONs.
2006
Fiber To The Home (FTTH) networks, mostly based on passive optical networks (PONs)
using optical splitters to connect multiple subscribers on one fiber, begin
deployment worldwide.
2007
Bend insensitive singlemode fiber was introduced to reduce losses caused by stress
on the fibers. It would lead to the development of microcables and high fiber count
cables.
2007
2007
Smartphones
iPhone
2008
Coherent fiber optic communications
Ciena introduces a coherent fiber optic system for long haul fiber at 100Gb/s and
higher.
2009
Bend insensitive multimode fiber was introduced to reduce losses caused by stress
on the fibers. It became the de factor standard for multimode fiber.
2010
Ethernet speeds were upped another 10 times – 100G using multi-lane parallel optics
for MM fiber and WDM for SM fiber. 40G options were also developed, including an
option for short links on Cat 8 UTP copper cables.
2010
GF
Over 1100 communities responded to Google’s invitation to become the first Google
Fiber city with gigabit Internet FTTH service. Kansas City won the initial
competition and construction began in 2011.
2010
4G and LTE cellular systems provided a big jump in bandwidth over 3G at a good time
as smartphone usage grows exponentially
2010
ITU G.987/8 standard for 10G passive optical network, can work as overlay for GPON
using WDM
2011
Using low power small cells to add capacity to urban wireless networks
epb
The Electricity Power Board of Chattanooga, TN offers first gigabit FTTH broadband
network
2013
Austin, TX becomes second Google Fiber City
Over the next few years, Google fiber also added Provo, and Salt Lake City, UT,
Charlotte, NC, Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham, NC, San Antonio and Huntsville.
2011
OCP was started by Facebook in 2009 to standardize data center product design and
make designs open source. Designs are popular especially in hyperscale data
centers.
2011
TIA standardizes OM4 multimode fiber with higher bandwidth for faster networks.
2016
Google fiber announced it would stop expansion but continue offering service to
cities where it was operating.
OM5 fiber was specified for bandwidth in the range of 850-950nm to allow wavelength
division multiplexing with VCSELs.
Nokia Bell Labs and Tech Univ Munich demonstrates transmission of 1 terabits/sec
over singlemode fiber, approaching the Shannon limit.
2017
Corning Microcable
Microcables use bend-insensitive fibers to pack more fibers into smaller cables,
easing installation
2018
Fiber optic cables with very high fiber counts introduced, 1728/3456 and 6912
fibers introduced for use in data centers and dense metropolitan areas.
2019
2020
Working from home using videoconferencing adds enormous traffic to the Internet,
but fiber optic communications systems continue to work without glitches.
2020
2021
Hollow core fiber becomes commercially available, promoted because light travels
almost 50% faster in the hollow core than in glass core fiber.
2022
PAM4 encoding transceivers
Using pulse amplitude modulation allowed transceivers to double the data with the
same bit rate.
Future
Who knows!
Links:
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