The topic of our conversation today is fiber bandwidth. Over the past thirty years, it has been increased several times. Fiber transmission capacity has grown much faster than even an increase in the volume of electronic memory chips or the power of microprocessors has occurred. Although in recent cases, over the years, progress has made a big leap.
Let's see what bandwidth depends on. First of all, the fiber length significantly affects this. It follows that the larger it is, the more harmful effects will be. They are also called “chromatic or interdomain dispersion”. And the more such effects, the lower the possible transfer rate.
For small distances, such as several hundred meters or less (storage networks), multi-house fibers are often used. This is due to the fact that they are cheaper in terms of installation (they have a large fiber core area, making it easier to spliced). The data transfer rate in this case can reach from several hundred megabits to ten gigabits per second. This will depend on which data technology is used for transmission, as well as the length of the fiber. In this case, the Internet bandwidth will be sufficient for comfortable work.
As for
single-mode fiber, it is usually used at large distances, ranging from several kilometers onwards. In modern commercial telecommunication systems, the bandwidth is from two and a half to ten gigabits per second per channel of information transfer. This is an indicator for a distance of ten kilometers or more.
In the near future, these systems will be able to use even greater speed of information transfer. Its performance will start at forty gigabits per second and even go up to one hundred and sixty. Today, the existing total power is achieved by transmitting multiple channels with different wavelengths through the fibers. This is called spectral multiplexing. The total transmission speed can reach several terabits in one second. This will be quite enough to transmit multi-million telephone channels at the same time. But even these indicators are not the physical limit of optical fiber today. It is also worth noting that fiber optic cables can contain several layers.
Summing up, we can conclude that there is no reason for concern that technical restrictions for optical fiber in the future may become a serious obstacle to data transmission. On the contrary, the possibility of information transfer can progress much faster than the same data storage systems or computing power. This is an inspiration for some people who dare to predict that any transmission restriction will become obsolete in the future. There are also suggestions that large storage systems and computing in high-capacity data networks will gain wide demand. This development will be more limited by security and software. Physical bandwidth will play a much smaller role in this.