Advanced fiber optic components for DWDM communications

As the rapid expansion of the Internet occupies increasing amounts of bandwidth, DWDM is seen as the most promising solution for broadband fiber-optic networks. With both terrestrial national backbone and undersea systems approaching Tb/s capacities, advanced fiber-optic components are key in enabling DWDM systems with narrow channel spacings to achieve the large numbers of channels required. We present the state of development of some of these key components here.