Abstract: A continuous length of side emitting optical fiber is secured to a cable's jacket or imbedded into the jacket along the cable's entire length. When a light source is coupled to one or both ends of the side emitting fiber its entire length lights up. This instantly identifies the entire cable length and enables the cable to be quickly and accurately located along the entire cable route. Cables with side emitting fiber are installed and operated without light sources coupled to the cables. Light sources are only coupled to the cable's side emitting fiber when the cable needs to be identified. Different colored light sources can be coupled to different side emitting fiber cables, which allow the identification of multiple cables at one time by color distinction. The side emitting fiber can be secured to the cable in various patterns along the cable length.

Abstract: With Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Modules (ROADMs) gaining popularity in the fiber optic market, many network designers are seeing the benefits of this technology. But the industry standard has been to make ROADMs automatically configurable, which adds considerably to the cost. Significant savings can be achieved by creating a manual ROADM for locations that do not require frequent configuration changes. This is achieved using a unique front panel configuration of a simple Optical Add Drop Module (OADM) system.

Abstract: The rapid switching of optical fiber communication between one or two working optical amplifiers and one protect optical amplifier is accomplished using fast optical fiber switching and alarm detection circuits that protects the loss of communication due to amplifier failure.

Abstract: The transmission of multiple signals over multimode fiber is accomplished using single-mode transmission lasers and single-mode DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) and CWDM (Coarse Wave Division Multiplexing) multiplexers. It also allows for any datarate communication, including high datarate (10 Gbps and faster) signals to be transported over any distance of multimode fiber. This ability will allow institutions that currently have multimode fiber in place, to extend the useful life of the fiber by increasing multimode fiber transmission capacity and thereby reducing overall infrastructure costs.