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Development of Glass Optical Fibers 1970-2020, Providing Us the Digitalized Communication World



Author(s)

Tarja T. Volotinen¹ and C. Bertil Arvidsson²

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DOI:10.17265/2161-6213/2023.1-3.001

1. Univ. of Eastern Finland, Institute of Photonics, Joensuu 80130, Finland
2. Arvidsson Fiber Optics AB, Valla 64161, Sweden

New types of communication cables were found to be needed already during the 1960-decade, because the copper cables had, and still would have, too high attenuation and especially limited bandwidth, due to extremely high dispersion at communication signals above 2 Mbit/s. Already the first commercially available multimode optical fibers (1979), developed from pure silica glass with a Ge-doped core, had much lower attenuation at signal frequencies of the order of 2-9 Mbit/s and above it. However, fiber core, cladding and coating materials, cable structures and materials, as well as manufacturing-, measurements- and test methods have been needed to be developed much further to get the reliable fiber cable communication networks. The important development stages and solutions to the most significant childhood problems of the optical fibers and cables are described in this paper. Now over 500 million km of optical fibers are manufactured and installed worldwide for the communication networks. The understanding of how to make the fibers with the very good transmission, mechanical and reliability properties exists at the manufacturers of the fibers and cables.

Optical fibers, attenuation problems, dispersion problems, mechanical strength problems, reliability, core and cladding materials, transmission properties, mechanical properties.