BACK REFLECTION
SUBMARINE OPTICAL FIBER Simpler is better BY JOSÉ CHESNOY INTRODUCTION
The invention of silica optical fiber by Professor Kao [Reference 1], later Nobel Prize, was not immediately perceived as one of the most important technical breakthrough of the 20th century. But it revealed now to be the corner stone of our digital world. More than 2 Billion kilometers (km) of silica fibers have been deployed worldwide since the beginning of the 90s, whilst more than 300 Million km are sold every year since 2014 for all applications from long haul to Fiber to the home (FTTH). Despite “only” 10 Million km of submarine fibers have been deployed since the advent of optical submarine cables, one can stress that before any other application, the optical fiber became the enabling technology of our submarine cables and permitted them to become the skeleton of the internet. This short paper intend to recall below the surprising peregrinations of optical fibers up to our present submarine cables.
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE