Trends in Optical Fibre Metrology and Standards

Fibre Optics has gained prominence in: telecommunications, data transmission and distribution, cable television networks, sensing and control, light probing and instrumentation. The 1990's shows an increased expansion of optical fibre networks which respond to the rapid growth on a world scale of long distance trunk lines combined with a family of emerging optical based services in which fibre-to-the-home will have the greatest impact. There is already evidence that optical communications are moving toward higher bit-rates, wavelength transparency and irrelevance of signal formats. The rate of change in fibre optics and the emergence of new services will be a mere consequence of economics. The actual increasing of cost and the demand for high-date-rates or large bandwidth per transmission channels, and the lack of available space in the congested conduits in urban areas, strongly favour the technological change to fibre optics. The recognised advantages of fibre optic technologies andthe unchallenged potential to respond to future needs requires the inclusion of fibre optics networking into new installations. Concomitantly, current progress in the field of optical fibres (optical fibre amplifiers, optical fibre switching, WDM, fibre gratings, etc.) unfold major technical advances and greater flexibility in the designs and engineering of networks, optical fibre components and instrumentation. The explosion of growth in fibre sensors, fibre probes and the myriad of fibre based components shows that we are only using a fraction of optical fibre potential.