Talk:Fiber-optic communication

Merger proposal

I will work on this soon. There seems to be a lot of information on both source sections, and making a new article shouldn't be difficult. johnpseudo 23:02, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

I support this change. The communications section is too long compared to the rest of the optical fiber article, and the optical communication article is written to cover too broad a topic, "any form of telecommunication that uses light as the transmission medium," to ever become a coherent high-quality article. The Photon 04:59, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Cable TV

I think that historically, (e.g., in the '90s) fiber optics for cable television were typically analog rather than digital, carrying essentially the same rf signals that electrical distribuition systems would have carried. This led to different requirements on the transmitters (high linearity), and probably other differences to telephone network optical fiber communication. I assume that analog systems are at least still in use, even if they're no longer being deployed. Can anyone confirm this and edit it into the article? -- The Photon 01:21, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

See Hybrid fibre-coaxial. Downstream is always 'analog'; some systems digitize the upstream and transmit as baseband digital. Also, some FTTP systems use a seperate wavelength for cable TV type signals. Mirror Vax 07:19, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

more on the limitations

• "With current fibre technilogy [sic], the achievable bandwidth is in excess of 50, 000 [sic] Gbps (50Tbps) and many people are looking very hard for better materials. The current practical limit of about 1Gbps is due to our inability to convert between electrical and optical signals any faster." - Andrew Tanenbaum, in 'Computer Networks' (3rd Edition, Prentice-Hall 1996) [1] 71.103.84.158 23:07, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
  • I think the 2002 edition of the "fiber-optic communication systems" book I used is probably a little more accurate. johnpseudo 00:10, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Ah, does most of the article reference the book? I didn't see a specific reference link to the book.

Also, I didn't see a succinct summarization of the information above when I scanned the article. - 71.103.81.38 23:40, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

• • Yeah, I got most of the information from that book. I figured if I'm going to pay 80 bucks for a textbook, I'd better be able to use it for more than one semester. Do the most recent changes address your concern? Honestly, I think what this article needs more than anything else is a bunch of pictures, but I can't find any that I'm sure fair-use applies to. johnpseudo 01:52, 13 October 2006 (UTC)