Multimode Graded-Index Optical Fibers for Next-Generation Broadband Access

Growing research interests are focused on the high-speed telecommunications and data communications networks with increasing demand for accessing to the Internet even from home. For instance, in Nov 2011 Strategy Analytics forecasted that there would be more than 807 million broadband fixed line subscriptions worldwide in 2017, based on a figure of 578 million at the end of 2011 showing a cumulative annual growth rate of around 8 percent [1]. This increasing demand for high-speed information transmission over the last two deca‐ des has been driven by the huge successes during the last decade of new multimedia serv‐ ices, commonly referred as Next-Generation Access (NGA) services, such as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) or Video on Demand (VoD), as well as an increased data traffic driven by High-Definition TV (HDTV) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications which have changed people's habits and their demands for service delivery. Consequently, consumer adoption of broadband access to facilitate use of the Internet for knowledge, commerce and, obviously, entertainment is contingent with the increment of the optical broadband access network capacity, which should extent into the customer's premises up to the terminals. Thus, steady increases in bandwidth requirements of access networks and local area net‐ works (LANs) have created a need for short-reach and medium-reach links supporting data rates of Gbps (such as Gigabit Ethernet, GbE), 10Gbps (such as 10-Gigabit Ethernet, 10GbE) and even higher (such as 40and 100Gigabit Ethernet standards, namely 40GbE and 100GbE respectively, which started in November 2007 and have been very ratified in June 2010). Detailed studies [2, 3] have defined the required bit-rates to be transmitted to the cus‐ tomer’s premises for different profiles for the traffic flows, reaching a total future-proof