
15
Specialty fibers for optical
communication systems
Ming-Jun Li, Xin Chen, Daniel A. Nolan, Ji Wang,
James A. West, and Karl W. Koch
Corning Inc., Corning, NY, USA
15.1 INTRODUCTION
Optical fiber communications have changed our lives in many ways over the last
40 years. There is no doubt that low-loss optical transmission fibers have been critical
to the enormous success of optical communications technology. It is less well known
however, that fiber-based components have also played a critical role in this success.
Initially, fiber optic transmission systems were point to point systems, with lengths
significantly less than 100 km. Then in the 1980s,