Seven-core optical fiber in a passive optical access network

The exponential growth in the capacity demands of telecommunications has increased the requirement for the number of optical fibers in an access network infrastructure, leading to problems with use of duct pipes for laying new optical fibers. The implementation of a new, optical access infrastructure is very costly, especially an underground infrastructure, so this is becoming a major problem for service providers, and has led to them finding ways to use existing duct pipes for laying these new optical fibers. One of the solutions is to use the new technology of multi-core, optical fibers to solve this problem. This paper presents a solution for increasing the number of users per single trunk and resolving the congestion problems in passive optical access network ducts by replacing standard, single-core, single-mode optical fibers with novel, seven-core (7-core), single-mode optical fibers, which can be easily fabricated using a stack-and-draw procedure.