Advances in Lightwave Systems Research.

Twenty years have passed since the first serious proposal was made to employ a glass fiber waveguide as a telecommunications transmission medium. Vigorous research and development efforts have led to widespread applications of optical-fiber communication throughout the telecommunications industry. Current lightwave systems research is motivated to explore the vast potential bandwidth of low-loss single-mode fibers for long-haul and local-networking applications. Systems experiments employing experimental single-frequency lasers and low-noise avalanche photodiodes have attained multi-Gb/s transmission in single- mode fibers well over 100-km long.