Evolving optical fiber designs

The introduction of optical amplifiers early this decade, combined with the advancement of transmitter and multiplexing technology, has allowed the bundling of many transmission channels onto a single fiber. This has occurred simultaneously with an increasing demand for information carrying capacity driven by everything from deregulation to an explosion in Internet use. To meet these challenges, fiber manufacturers are evolving new fiber designs to facilitate changing transmission techniques. This paper discusses the driving forces behind new fiber designs, and examine some of the advances that have been made, including dispersion compensating fiber, non-zero dispersion shifted fiber, and large effective area fiber.