Technologies that use optical fibers

This chapter discusses various aspects of technologies that use optical fibers. Fiber optic systems are used in many technologies to take advantage of the unique properties of optical fibers, which include wide bandwidths, low loss, noise immunity, and galvanic isolation. Short distance transmission can make use of analog transmission with applications such as closed-circuit television and cable television distribution systems. The digital signals are simply on/off pulses of light and they can be detected, and near perfect pulses can be regenerated at regular intervals along the transmission system. The advantages of a fiber system are the low losses, high noise immunity, and with dielectric cables protection against high voltages such as lightning strikes. 100VG-AnyLAN is a 100 Mb/s LAN technology, which can use a fiber optic cable. Category 3 wire is used due to the lower frequency signaling rate with parallel transmission of data over four pairs of wires. Synchronous optical networks and synchronous digital hierarchy use synchronous operation of the transmission nodes on a network, which is usually a fiber optic cable. The fiber channel, an interface technology allowing transfer of very large amounts of data at high speed and with little delay, is also discussed in the chapter.