Impact of component innovation and application development on fiber-to-the-desk systems

Summary form only given. Initially, local area networks (LANs) were composed entirely of copper wire links. As networks have expanded in size and increased in data rate, optical fiber has begun to replace copper in the backbone and interbuilding links. Most recently, fiber has replaced copper in many vertical, or between closet, links. To date, in spite of fiber's increasing presence in much of the network, copper has remained the technology of choice in the last 100 meters. Although this has delayed fiber-to-the-desk, the critical issue is not if fiber will replace copper but rather how the migration will occur and what technologies will make fiber the compelling choice.