Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The fiber optics community honored its own leader last night with a special two-hour tribute to Charles Kao, considered the founder of fiber optics. This was the first time the entire community has met at its most popular conference following Charlie's elevation to Nobel laureate.

It was in 1966 when Charlie wrote his famous paper with George Hockham suggesting that commerciable levels of photons could transmit voice and data using laser beams over "a glassy" conduit.

Incredibly, the paper's thesis played out. Only four years later, the famous team from Corning made the first optical fibers that met the 20 db/km spec mentioned in the Kao paper as suggesting a potentially commerciable product. This immediately put flesh on the bones of the paper, gave it credibility. There was a path where remaining steps could be played out.

The celebration last night included various aspects of the technology's playing out, including the Corning effort. William Shaver brought the news from the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence in May 1966 that the potential of optical fiber could lead to commercial applications. Corning's Bill Armistead named Robert Maurer to lead a small team. Don Keck and Peter Schultz joined soon thereafter. But glass losses were in the thousands of decibels per kilometer. After much frustration, the team was able to make a fiber that had losses of 17 db/km, which met the standard. Keck wrote in his lab notebook: "Whoopee!"

Corning thereafter decided to put optical fiber into the development phase in 1971. This was followed in 1972 by a further research step forward when gernania doping was added. This led to levels of 4 db/km.

This led to countless depositions and lawsuits as Corning was to successfully defend its patents in the years to come.

Charlie's Nobel speech was repeated by his wife, Gwen, last night. Gwen also gave the speech in Sweden. Charlie, who has Alzheimer's, was at both events but did not further participate.

As Gwen points out, the world knew about the announcement from the Nobel Committee within minutes of its announcement thanks to the fiber optics technology that Charlie had originally founded.

Charlie, who was raised in Shanghai, received special treatment from his parents because two older siblings had died from an epidemic when they were 10 and 12 years of age. He moved to the U.K. for college and stayed thereafter for many years before moving back to China,.He began working at ITT and began research that was to lead to the 1966 paper. His original area of concentration was microwave.

Interestingly, he spent the late 1960s, after publication of the paper, selling the idea of fiber optics around the world--to Japan, Europe and the United States, according to the Nobel speech. "Nothing in our lives was planned. It has been a roller coaster," Gwen observes.

Charlie and Gwen lived in Roanoke, Va. for eight years beginning in 1974. He was named Executive Scientist at ITT and the family moved to Connecticut thereafter.

In the 1980s, Charlie's prophesy that fiber optics would change telecommunications were coming true. Those who recall expensive three minute calls can appreciate how much current calls cost. Gwen suggests that this was the result of fiber optics.

"Charles planted the seed, but it would never have grown without many hands doing the toil," said Gwen. "Charles thanks all those who have worked to do that. And the plant is still growing."

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC, Optics history fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, nobelists, charles kao, nobel prize, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

We sometimes forget that the service providers need to stay up almost in real time with the varous iterations the Internet is going through. Forget getting over voice to accommdate data. The Internet has metamorphosed far beyond that and is changing almost daily.

"The super-aggregators are changing the way the Internet is configured," says Verizon's Stuart Elby, who spoke at the Service Provider Summit this morning. Up until recently the Internet was "well structured," and then the Googles came along and changed all that, he laments. "You and I used to be albe to connect to the Internet the same way businesses did."

These super aggregators now account for about 50 percent of Internet traffic, Elby calculates. "These hyper-giants are aggregating a lot of content." He calculates there are 30 or 40 main culprits.

One could say they are having a worldwide impact if one is following what is happening in China with Google. Indeed, they are changing the face of the Internet globally. Elby calculates that more than a billion people now use the Internet.

This has caused a big change from Verizon's perspective. "It also has changed how goods and services are paid for on the Internet," he observes.

"The result is that content is being higly consolidated by a small number of hyper giants."

Other changes have included flow from the premise through passive optical networking technology, which in some instances have caused the bottleneck to be pushed farther out into the network. And of course there is the advent of cloud computing.

"In the past we saw a simple number of devices, such as computers and MACs," says Stuart. "More recently we have seen thousands of different types of devices with different formats connected to the network. User content sometimes has to be transformed into hundreds or thousands of different flavors."

But those are not the only changes. Some time in the last two years it became clear that the Internet was being accessed more by mobile devices than fixed devices, according to Stuart. "This concerns me greatly," says Stuart. "Mobile IP which is what most wireless networks are based upon, MIP, are all about simplifying the control at the cost of the tradeoff of not optimizing the router." The result is Verizon is looking for companies to "optimize the routing. Please either optimize or take us away from mobile IP."

There is a good reason Stuart is almost pleading in this request. The company's FiOS fiber to the home build is largely closing down at least for now and the carrier is focusing on wireless technologies next year. It is in a battle with AT&T to build the best wireless network in America, a theme that is being played out in competing national ad campaigns.

With the prospect of bringing 1 gig to the home and potentially 10 gig to the home, Verizon is rapidly upgraiding to 40 gig in the metro space, says Stuart. This is going to the head end if a cable company a central office if a telco.

Is it any wonder that Verizon is the first company to go to 100 gig in its commercial network in North America? "We are quickly going from 10 to 40 to 100 gig all because end users at the bottom are trying to get to the clouds on top," he says referring to a viewgraph he shows.

The end result? "Lots of users are trying to get content from a very few sources," says Stuart. And the bandwidth requirements keep on heading up to the clouds.

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, internet, 21st century, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics 

One thing that became very clear when I interviewed Randy Giles, this year's Tyndall award winner, was that he has been involved in a wide array of the seminal breakthroughs that have driven fiber optics in the past 25 years. In the time that Giles career has spanned Northern Telecom and mainly Bell Labs he has been involved with the development of optical amplification, wavelength division mulitiplexing, optical add/drop multiplexers and optical switching--all in a substantive manner.

As part of my interview with him this morning as part of the Fiber Story history series, Randy describes a highly involved career that essentially defined the milestones of optical transport achievement and advancement. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, the modest Giles got his Ph.D in laser physics and initially worked with the legendary Jan Conradi at Bell Northern Research. His initial work was in gigabit optical transmission, which was very exciting at a time when fiber optic systems topped out at 405 Mbps or 560 Mbps.

"I was an neophyte, didn't understand anything about fiber optics," he recalls. "But I did have a background in electronics. Conradi told me to do some homework in fiber optics. Literally a few months later I started working on gigabit fiber optics."

He started working at Bell Labs in 1986, accepting a position from Tingye Li. His almost magical association with optical transport pioneers, which rivaled Forrest Gump-type fortune, was continuing. "I wasn't thinking clearly after offered the job and didn't accept immediately. However I called back 24 hours later and asked Tingye if the job was still available. It was."

Opitcal amplifiers were part of Giles' Ph.D work and his initial research involved semiconductor optical amplifiers. This led to his involvement with optical amplifiers and wavelength division multiplexing, which avoided the crosstalk and other issues of SOAs.Randy is also proud of his efforts in the design modeling of the optical amplifiers themselves.

The competition to develop optical amplifiers in WDM systems was "very intense" in the 1990 timeframe, Randy notes. Yet the competition at least with Southampton University involving David Payne in the U.K. was friendly to an extent. "There was a time when we were looking to the gain characteristics of the optical amplifiers and there seemed to be a discrepancy between their gain feed and our gain feed. We swapped fibers, we exchanged ideas and we found that their fiber composition was different from ours and that explained the shift of the gain and it all sort of resolved itself. So it was a benign competition."

Giles was also involved with some of the first Bragg grating optical add drop multiplexers. "We had the optical amplifiers, the EDFAs. We had to pump them efficiently. "The challenge was to stabilize the 980 pumps. So we had to work with colleagues to provide a narrow feedback into the laser to stabilize itself. So we had gratings and WDM signals so the next thing was to take the gratings and begin to make the next add drop multiplexers. Today of course arrayed waveguides have superceded the gratings but those gratings were very effective in making the first add drop multiplexers."

It was a bit of a departure to start working on MEMS (micro-electrical mechanical systems) from optical add drop multiplexers, Giles relates. He began working with Dave Bishop and others in that area. "I began working with very simple MEMS switches. I realized we could start putting these together. We started making 4x4 and working with Bill Brinkman began working on the lambda router, which went from 256 by 256 to 1296 by 1296."

"I was in the thick of all of these efforts," says Giles, who most recently has been named to head Alcatel-Lucent Korea. It has been a storied career that still has a few twists and turns to go.  

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, tyndall award, randy giles, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics    

In a rare historical moment, Robert Maurer, Peter Schulz and Don Keck, the team that originally made the first commerciable optical fibers in the world while at Corning, have been reunited at the show this week. I was humbled to have a few moments to talk to them about their revolutionary discovery, which has created a multi-billion dollar industry and changed the face of communications.

It was clear that Maurer was the leader, a man who began to look into low-loss optical fibers in 1966 when the famouns Kao/Hockham paper was first published. "Things went pretty slow at first and it was clear I was going to need some help," says Maurer. "When I got these two guys to join me, things picked up."

Maurer and the team had no doubt what their mission was, and that telephone companies were running out of capacity. "Everybody knew there were constraints and that optical communications was a possible solution," Keck recalls.

Schulz, who will fully detail the discovery tomorrow night at a special event honoring Charles Kao, remembers that it was actually a visit by a Corning official to the British Ministry of Defence that made the possibility clear. "We were really told very specifically by that Ministry of Defence team to try to make single-mode fiber with about a five micron core and to have attenuations of less than 20 dBs per kilometer. So our goal was to go from that to actually succeed."

None of the three would say they knew they were going to succeed from the outset. "We wanted to try," recalls Maurer. "I don't think anything can be done until it is."

Maurer led the group, Schulz was working with materials, Keck was working with measurements. The fibers were being drawn in the development group."We were really seeing if but using fused silica and putting additives into fused silica to change the refractive index," recalls Maurer. "We were trying to see if that method could lead to an actual fiber. We had no idea whether it could or not."

"Together we kept going forward as we ran our experiments," recalls Schulz.

"We were looking for other glasses that were high in silica at that time," says Maurer.

"Bob always told us if we only do things like everyone else, all you can hope for is a tie," says Keck. "We were looking for a win." Therefore, the team decided to take a contrarian approach. "The contrarian approach was to put an impurity in the glass to raise the refractive index--not enough impurity to impair anythiing. Then you put the silica around it. Ultimately it came to that sort of break that led to our winning solution. But it wasn't exactly like falling off a log."

Not hardly. In fact the early fibers the team worked on had losses of tens of thousands of dBs, recalls Schulz, "higher than the best conventional optical glasses. We worked away at it, picked away at it, and found what the mechanisms were and slowly but surely eliminated the losses until finally after four years of work we ended up finding what worked."

There were actually two eureka moments. The first involved Keck, who had just heated a fiber late in the afternoon in 1970, took the fiber out of the furnace and had a laser beam hooked up. "The laser beam hit the core of the fiber and I was blinded by the light. It was a big blaze of helium neon light and then we went through the measurements and had met our goal," recalls Keck.

Schulz says Eureka II came two years later when the team was struggling to bring the fiber to commercial mode. In the meantime it kept working to try to find other additives to improve it. "In 1972 we made a germania doped silica core fiber. This was multimode. This germania doped fiber we were pulling it and the light kep blazing through the fiber. First loss measurement was four dB per kilometer. We knew we had something."

The team stayed engaged thereafter and got support from idfferent teams and the effort got bigger until literally thousands of researchers were involved

While germania doping was a key, it took many, many years before the first long-haul fiber was used, Keck recalls. In fact, it was 12 years after that initial discovery."When you revolutionize the world, young scientists don't understand how long it takes."

Other problems were knocked out one by one through the expanded groups of researchers at Corning and elsewhere. LEDs were used before problems could be overcome with lasers, including coupling. Corning joined with Siemens to create a cable company known as Siecor. General Cable became involved.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Maurer's advice to young scientists? "Don't be afraid. Go ahead and try it." Adds Keck: "Have a dream. Find somebody to share it with."

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, OFC/NFOEC, Optics history fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, optical history

Contributed by: C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The celebration began anew this morning for Charles Kao, the father of fiber optics. This is the first time OFC/NFOEC has had the opportunity to honor him since he won the 2009 Nobel prize in physics, an award he shared with two other physicists. To our industry, he is the man, the kingpin, the major domo, the chairman of the board. In short, he is all that and a bag of chips.

Charlie has been honored before. He was so distinguished on the 25th anniversary of the seminal paper he wrote to launch the industry "Dielectric-fibre surface waveguide for optical frequencies" in the United Kingdom in 1966. This was also an OFC, the one in Baltimore in 1991. In fairness, Charlie co-authored the paper with George Hockham. But he was always the driving force, the passionate philosopher king who was given the providential vision the rest of the world lacked.

OFC/NFOEC does many things well. But at the top of the list is conveying a sense history for the fiber optics industry and this strengthens the sense of overall purpose and mission. Much of that is manifested by celebrations and awards such as this. Charlie's award and recognition comes in large part because what flowed out of the paper.

That's because the things in the paper were on-target. Four years after he predicted a silica fiber could transmit commerciable levels of light with acceptable loss (below 20 decibels per kilometer), Corning made it happen through an extraordinary effort. The accompanying lasers and detectors also were fashioned to make it work.

While humble in nature, Charlie has remained committed to fiber optics. This came through in the times I had the opportunity to interview him, also at OFCs. Once in the early 1980s, I asked him if fiber optics would ever be used for undersea transmission. "The oceans will be littered with fiber," he responded. This was six years before TAT-8, the first trans-oceanic fiber network was to be commissioned.

Charlie also predicted that people would use all the broadband that they could get their hands on, and that the costs would come crashing down. This was before we had dial-up service. And more than a few scientists have speculated that it is more than coincidence that Charlie's decision to settle in China some years ago and the rise of Huawei as a major fiber optics powerhouse.

In honoring Charlie this morning, Bell Labs pioneer Tingye Li recall a quote in 2004 that Charlie had made: "If you ask me how long we will see fibers being used, it may be 1,000 years without a replacement."

That's quite a legacy.

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, Information technology, OFC/NFOEC, Optics history fiber, fiber optics, communications, optical networking, information technology, nobel laureates, optics history, charles kao, ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

Not surprisingly, the main focus of the OFC Executive Summit at least this morning has been 40 gigs and 100 gigs. Finisar Chairman Jerry Rawls, who had some good one liners, congratulated all in attendance as being "survivors, we are all still alive and can look to 40 G and 100 G to move ahead."

As Ovum's Dana Cooperson pointed out, however, 40 G and 100 G are becoming two distinct markets and technologies. They are no longer lumped together just the next gen high-speed solutions. 40 G is becoming a reality now, while 100 G is still in its very early stages, said Dana.In fact 40 G represented a $500 million market in 2009 and is expected to double again this year. That's beginning to sound serious.

"We are starting to see 40 G take off," said Dana. "We are starting to see the prices get to the point where 40 G makes a lot of sense." She commended Nortel for "incredibly" shipping 100 G product in 2009, although it is still very early days for that space. "We are at the very, very early initial stages for 100 G."

 The idea that major network carriers are holding off for 100 G seems to be lost in the rush of companies actually being able to get 40 G. In fact, Jerry says his company has not yet even begun making 100 G chipsets.

As we step up to the next level, a lot of 10 G is continuing to go in, although Dana said 2.5 Gbps is "starting to die off."

Google again seems to be ahead of the curve. "For us," said Google Senior Network Architect Bikash Koley, " the question is not 40G or 100G but how many 100 G streams you can run in a fiber."

Getting back to Rawls' first quote, its is nice for the fiber optics industry to once again have a market to look forward to, similar to when it looked forward to 10 Gbps back in the 1990s. "Prime time for 40 gig and 100 gig is still ahead of us" said Hans-Juergen Schmidtke at Nokia-Siemens Networks. Schmidtke believes network traffic will grow 100 fold in the next five to seven years.  

So once the 40 gig market reaches maturity, how many successful 100 gig companies will follow? The concensus was three or four on Panel 2: Components and Subsystems for 40- and 100 Gbps."  But those lucky enough to make it should do very well as the market will be huge, according to Sierra Monolithics CEO Javed Patel.

By the way, there is still strong sentiment for consolidation in the optical components space as voiced by Jerry Rawls and Mintera CEO Terry Unter even with all that has happened. However, Jerry doesn't see any companies going out of business as the result of the 100 G consolidation, noting for example that companies in Japan never do. He does expect a few guys in America to "lose their jobs."

But all in all the mood is good, upbeat. There is a lot to look forward to in accommodating burgeoning Internet growth especially as the major carriers wake from their recent cap ex slumber and the building blocks seem to be 40 G and 100 G for years to come.

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, Information technology, OFC/NFOEC fiber optics, communications, optical communications, networks, internet, information technology, ofc/nfoec, executive forum

Post contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

How appropriate to have Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist and the "Father of the Internet" (sorry, Al Gore), kick off the 2010 Executive Forum at OFC/NFOEC this morning. Cerf lives in a world of interplanetary Internets ("Unfortunately, we haven't yet figured out how to stop the planets from revolving around the sun"), where he is notified remotely if his wine cellar gets above a certain temperature,and where terabit speeds down a fiber are everyday realities.

 The 1-Gbps-to-the-home experiment that Google has announced has mainly been about "where the community is going to be located to this point," Cerf said. One town has agreed to change its name to "Google" if it gets the job while a second says it will distribute Google beer if it gets the honor, Vint told us.

Not surprisingly, Google's interest in building such a network is in how it will work. Most of the human interest to this point, and the interest from the Federal Communications Commission, has been for the folks who will be the beneficiaries of such a nice chunk of broadband. "Part of this is trying to find out what the implementation issues are," Vint said. "We are also interested in what the economics are going to look like." We would venture to say that Verizon, AT&T and most other carriers will also be keenly interested in those numbers.

"Its clear that the obvious thing to do is fiber-based," says Cerf about the one gig community. However, high speed radio waves may also play a role. "High speed radio working off fiber is a very attractive combination," he believes.

Regarding applications, Cerf said his hope is that "people will invent applications that we haven't thought of. If there is any lesson to be taken away from the Internet, it is that the users will have a better understanding than any vendor could possibly have." Now, there's a novel idea. After years of trying to have businesses anticipate how people will use bandwidth, why not let the people who use it themselves tell us.

As Charlie Kao, who founded fiber optics and who is being honored this week here at OFC/NFOEC has observed, "If you give people the bandwidth, they will find creative ways to use it." As with any idea that seems to naturally make sense, I have to wonder why we didn't do this years ago.

Ever the realist, Cerf said the 1 Gbps to the premise idea is not new, only new to America. You can actually get 1 Gbps in Tokyo for a reasonable cost and in some other places you can own your own dark fiber, he observed.

Along those lines, Cerf recognizes the problems with security over the Internet, and acknowledges that we are a long way to figuring it all out. He encourages users to constantly change their passwords. "Don't use reusable passwords," he says."Find methods to use dynamic passwords." Makes sense, but easier said than done.

Vint is also concerned about something he calls  "Bit Drop." "How much of the software we use in the year 3000, possibly Windows 3000, will be able to go back and read documents in 2000?" he wondered. "How much software in 2015 will be able to read documents we created in 2000? It's a concern."

It is a concern. Yet somehow it suggests the importance of new interactive software that will not just dump older files it needs to read. 

2010-03 March, Fiber optics, Information technology, OFC/NFOEC google, internet, fiber optics, communications, information technology, ofc/nfoec, 21st century, vinton cerf

By Patricia Daukantas

Three physicists have figured out how to recreate a famous X-ray-diffraction experiment with a laser and other simple equipment. Their goal is to enable undergraduate students to follow in the footsteps of a chemical physicist who helped to decode the structure of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), a young British scientist, took the famous X-ray diffraction image that was critical to identifying the structure of DNA as a double helix. Heidrun Schmitzer, Dennis Tierney and Gregory Braun of Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A.) include Franklin in their undergraduate course for non-majors on “Women Who Shaped Physics.” Featured scientists in the course include Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

In their poster paper at this week’s American Physical Society March meeting in Portland, Ore. (U.S.A.), Schmitzer and her colleagues described the classroom experiment, which requires only simple tools: a red laser and the spring from a retractable ballpoint pen. Shining the laser beam through the spring projects a diffraction pattern strikingly similar to Franklin’s famous image. See the Xavier group’s photo of diffracted light and compare it to the X-ray image from 57 years ago (and an accompanying mathematical analysis).

By comparing the geometry of the pen spring to the diffraction pattern of the light, and then studying the Franklin X-ray image at its original size, the students “can determine the angle, pitch and radius of the DNA molecule, just like Rosalind Franklin,” Schmitzer wrote in the abstract.

Last night I did a quick trial of this with a spring from an old pen, my cats’ favorite laser pointer and a darkened room. Unlike Schmitzer, I did not block the bright center maximum with anything, so my result wasn’t as visually stunning. But I could see some evidence of the “X” pattern with faint characteristic stripes. I suspect that, with a bit more equipment and refined technique, this could make a stunning classroom demonstration.

2010-03 March, Biomedical optics, Optics history education, lasers, optical history, dna, american physical society, aps, physics, biomedical optics

By Patricia Daukantas

Once again, the folks who run the GLOBE at Night project are inviting people from all over the world to measure the brightness of the night sky – no special equipment required.

As we described last year, this project takes place during March because that’s when the prominent constellation Orion is high in the sky fairly early in the evening. (In the Northern Hemisphere autumn, one must be a night owl or a before-dawn riser to catch a glimpse of “the Hunter.”)

You don’t even have to be savvy about the apparent-magnitude system that professionals use. You don’t even need a telescope. Just carry out these five steps on a clear night between now and Tuesday, March 16:

• Find your latitude and longitude with a Global Positioning System device or online tools.
• Find Orion in the clear evening sky (simple pattern recognition).
• Match your view of the constellation to one of the magnitude charts developed by GLOBE at Night – how many stars do you see?
• Record your observation on the Web site.
• Compare what you saw to others’ views.

Your effort will help GLOBE at Night track the pervasiveness and spread of light pollution. As the organizers of this project said in a press release, “With half of the world’s population now living in cities, many urban dwellers have never experienced -- and maybe never will -- the wonderment of pristinely dark skies.” The more awareness of the problem of light pollution, the greater the chance to stop its spread.

2010-03 March, Astronomy astronomy, education, globe, amateur astronomy, stargazing, stars, light pollution