Mining the optical bandwidth for a terabit per second

A significant part of optical-fiber capacity can be tapped now that optical amplifiers can boost many high-speed channels simultaneously. The erbium-doped optical fiber amplifier opened the floodgates to wide-bandwidth, all-optical schemes for multiplexing many wavelengths. Until the advent of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier, no practical all-optical amplifier existed. Optical signals were instead regenerated electronically to overcome the attenuation inherent in the silica fiber as well as other losses due to optical components along the line.