20 May 2002 -- OFS has made a "breakthrough" in low water peak fibres with the latest version of its AllWave fibre, the company claims.
The development achieves lower, permanent loss than other "no water peak" fibre in the market ; less than half the aging loss of the nearest competitor, OFS claims.
The water peak that appears in many commercial fibres prevents transmission in the wavelength range extending from 1350 to 1480nm because water molecules get trapped in the optical fibre and cause high signal loss in that region. OFS discovered how to eliminate the water molecules and won Bell Labs President's Gold Award in 2000.
Janice Haber, VP Systems Engineering and Market Development for OFS, said, "Our fibre is tested extensively under extreme hydrogen aging to ensure that the low loss we achieve will not return. We've shipped over five million kilometers since introducing AllWave at SuperComm in June 1998 and we expect to ship several million kilometers of new generation AllWave in 2002.
Fully standardized in ITU as a G.652c fibre, AllWave offers the same dispersion as conventional singlemode fibre but with reduced loss and zero water peak in the 1400nm water peak band. This enables the use of extra bandwidth equivalent to 100 dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) channels.