Optical fibre's low cost, accuracy and enormous capacity has revolutionized wide area communications, 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.

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.