2014A-8 The complete, up-to-date technical overview of optical communications. Fibre in the WAN, MAN, local loop, campus and LAN. Up-to-the-minute coverage of Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Previews today's advanced research--tomorrow's practical applications. Over the past 15 years, optical fibre's low cost, accuracy and enormous capacity has revolutionized wide area communications--making possible the Internet as we know it. Now a second fibre revolution is underway. Advanced technologies such as Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) are adding even more capacity, and fibre is increasingly the media of choice in MANs, campuses, buildings, LANs--soon, even homes. If you need to understand the state-of-the-art in optical communications, Understanding Optical Communications is the most complete, up-to-date technical overview available. Fundamental principles and components of optical communications. Optical communications systems, interfaces and engineering challenges. FDDI, Ethernet on Fibre, ESCON, Fibre Channel, SONET/SDH and ATM. WDM: sparse and dense approaches, photonic networking, WDM for LANs and WDM standards. Fibre in the local loop, integration with HFC networks and passive optical networks. Understanding Optical Communications reviews key technical issues facing engineers as they extend fibre into new applications and markets. It presents an up-to-the-minute status report on WDM for LANs and MANs, including a rare glimpse at IBM's latest experimental systems. It points to the advanced research most likely to bear fruit: dark and spatial solitons, advanced fibres, plastic technologies, optical CDMA, TDM and packet-networks and more. Whether you're building optical systems or planning for them, this is the briefing you've been looking for.