Gigabit network technology. Final technical report

Current digital networks are evolving toward distributed multimedia with a wide variety of applications with individual data rates ranging from kb/sec to tens and hundreds of Mb/sec. Link speed requirements are pushing into the Gb/sec range and beyond the envelop of electronic networking capabilities. There is a vast amount of untapped bandwidth available in the low-attenuation communication bands of an optical fiber. The capacity in one fiber thread is enough to carry more than two thousand times as much information as all the current radio and microwave frequencies. And while fiber optics has replaced copper wire as the transmission medium of choice, the communication capacity of conventional fiber optic networks is ultimately limited by electronic processing speeds