SC465 - Transmission Fiber and Cables
16 Mar 2026
09:00 - 12:00
Short Course Level
Advanced Beginner
Short Course Description
With over 3 billion kilometers of transmission optical fiber deployed world-wide, and many hundreds of millions of kilometers being added annually to support the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth, the future has never looked brighter for optical networking. Optical fiber cable has long served as the backbone for long distance high-bit-rate networks, and over the past ten years has been become the preferred technology for many network operators to enable “last-mile” connections to homes and businesses. Additionally, the drive to cloud services has resulted in large scale investments in hyper-scale data centers which rely on specialized optical fiber cables to connect servers and routers, as well as to interconnect the data centers themselves.
This short course will discuss the fundamentals of optical fiber production methods as well as provide some insight into the history of optical fiber and the physical principles which enable an optical fiber to be such a capable medium for communications. We will address the different categories of transmission of optical fibers that have been deployed, as well as dive into the newer fibers that have evolved to meet the challenges of today’s network deployments. A focus of this short course will also be on the cabling options, standards and performance considerations for various environments and the trade-offs that may exist for different cable types.
Short Course Benefits
This course will enable you to:
- Describe the motivation for the invention and initial applications of optical fiber cables for telecommunications
- Understand at a high level the key optical physics principles that enable optical fiber to function as the backbone of high speed communications
- Explain the different manufacturing processes and steps used in the fabrication of optical fiber, as well as the primary performance attributes for many optical networking applications
- Appreciate the relevant specified optical fiber attributes and their importance to network performance
- Compare the different transmission optical fiber types and their associated ITU-T standards, and intended uses
- Provide an overview on the primary optical cable types and their relevant applications in transmission networks from the LAN to trans-oceanic
- List the important performance elements and specifications and where they are applied for optical fiber cables to ensure successful deployments and longevity
- Discuss future trends in optical fiber cable technology
- Short Course Audience:
- This interactive course is intended for those with an interest in the fundamental physical building block of any optical network, the optical fiber cable. No prior knowledge of optical fiber, cable or networking required.
Short Course Audience
This course is intended for the technical community seeking to understand the basics of optical fiber and cable for typical telecommunications systems, focusing on products which are standards-compliant and have the broadest application. The course will cover single-mode and multi-mode fiber as well as submarine and other high data rate fibers. In addition to specific fiber attributes, the course will also describe typical cable designs to protect fibers from the stresses encountered in the service environment. Note that SC208 “Optical Fiber Design for Telecommunications and Specialty Applications” has similar background topics but focuses on tailoring the properties of optical fiber for specific uses.
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John Hedgpeth
Corning Optical Communications, United States
John Hedgpeth is Worldwide Applications Engineering Manager at Corning, supporting optical fiber products. John has held several positions during his 10-year tenure at Corning, including manufacturing support, quality management and product line management for submarine optical fiber. In addition to his work at Corning, John’s career has allowed for experiences in process engineering, research, and product management, all gained through working in the electronic components industry. John holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from NC State University.
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Mei Du
Tata Communications, United States
Mei Du received her Ph.D from The University of Chicago studying femtosecond spectroscopy. She started her telecommunication career in Lucent Bell labs, working on forward pumping distributed Raman amplification, pump-design for forward pumping Raman and high-speed transmission from 40Gb/s to 100Gb/s. Her interests then shifted to bringing advanced technologies into real-world applications. She was involved in an agile photonic-network design and developed in-service dispersion monitoring and transient control. She was involved in deploying a100Gb/s national network and conducted a SDN- enabled 400GE field trial. In subsea applications, she worked on remote-pumped EDFA and forward pumped distributed Raman research and deployed 40G/s (2009) and 100G /s (2012) on trans-Atlantic legacy cable. In recent years, she has worked on numerous legacy cable upgrades and on building
several new consortium cables.
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Georg Böcherer
Huawei Technologies, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Georg Böcherer holds M.Sc. (ETH Zürich, 2007), Ph.D. (RWTH Aachen University, 2012), and Dr.-Ing. habil. (Technical University of Munich (TUM), 2017) degrees, all in electrical engineering. 2017-2020, he worked as senior engineer at the Optical Communication Technology Lab of Huawei Technologies France, and since 2020, we works as principal engineer at the Optical and Quantum Communications Lab of Huawei Technologies Germany. Since 2018, he is lecturer at the TUM. His research is on machine learning, forward error correction, DSP, and information theory. G. Böcherer is the inventor of Probabilistic Amplitude Shaping. He received a Bell Labs Prize in 2015, the Johann-Philipp-Reis-Preis in 2017 and the 2019 IEEE/OSA JLT best paper award in 2019.
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Peter O'Brien
Tyndall, Ireland
Dr. Peter O’Brien obtained his PhD in Physics from University College Cork in 1999. He has a Masters in Electronic Engineering and Degree in Physics from Trinity College Dublin. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (Micro Devices Laboratory) where he worked on the development of millimetre wave devices for remote sensing applications. Dr O’Brien co-founded one (Biosensia) and founded a second company (Epi-Light). His second company, Epi-Light limited, developed speciality photonic systems for medical device and pharmaceutical applications. He successfully sold the company in 2009 and returned to the Tyndall National Institute to establish a research activity in advanced photonic packaging. Dr O’Brien is now head of the Photonics Packaging Group and is involved in a wide range of both academic and industry research projects, across the telecoms and medical device sectors. Dr. O’Brien is also deputy director of the Science Foundation Ireland, Irish Photonic Integration Centre.
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Harald Haas
University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
Professor Harald Haas, FIEEE, FREng, FRSE, FIET, is the Van Eck Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and Director of the LiFi Research and Development Centre. He coined and demonstrated LiFi in a 2011 TED Global Talk. Haas has co-founded pureLiFi Ltd. He currently leads the UK’s national research hub, TITAN, focused on the Network of Networks. He has delivered OFC short courses (2017–2019, 2024–2025) and IEEE ComSoc lectures (2017–2021).
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Vincent Chan
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
Vincent Chan received his BS/MS/EE/PhD from MIT (1971-1974.) He was the Head of the Communications and Information Technology Division of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (now Cyber and Communications Divisions), and Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He initiated the US’s Laser Intersatellite Transmission Experiment Program and the follow-on GeoLITE Program in 1980-1989. He was the first to use “Dual-Use Technology Investment” by the Clinton Administration to form and chaired: the All-Optical-Network Consortium among MIT/AT&T/DEC, the Next Generation Internet Consortium, ONRAMP among MIT/AT&T/Cabletron/Nortel/JDS, and a Satellite Networking Consortium formed among MIT/Motorola/Teledesic/Globalstar. His research focus is on communications and network architectures, intelligent network management and control and security. He chaired many advisory committees including the Defense Science Board Taskforce on Communications and Networks and DHS’s Science and Technology Advisory Board, and has been active with start-ups, a Board Member of a Fortune-500 network company, and a Member of the Corporation of Draper Laboratory. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is the recipient of the IEEE Thomas Edison Medal “For pioneering technical contributions and leadership in the fields of space and terrestrial optical communications and networks.”
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Mikael Mazur
Nokia Bell Labs, United States
Dr. Mikael Mazur received his PhD from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden in 2019. In his dissertation he studied optical frequency combs in optical communications, focusing on multi-wavelength signal processing schemes enabled by the comb coherence. In Jan 2020 he joined Bell Labs, NJ, as a member of technical staff in the advanced photonics research department. Currently his main research focuses developing novel fiber-optic sensing systems and real-time signal processing to seamlessly integrate sensing within optical data transmission infrastructure. With a particular focus on leveraging submarine cables, he is actively researching real-time deep-ocean monitoring for critical applications in environmental, oceanographic and geophysical investigations, and the development of cutting-edge tsunami and earthquake early warning systems. He is a member of IEEE, OPTICA and the SSA. He is also an active member of the Joint Task Force on SMART cables as well as the Suboptic working group on Sensing using Operational Subsea Cables.