City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

APPENDIX B 275
Late 1983: Stew Miller retires as head of Bell Labs fiber development
group.
January 1, 1984: AT&T undergoes first divestiture, splitting off its
seven regional operating companies but keeping
long-distance transmission and equipment manufacture.
1984: British Telecom lays first submarine fiber cable to
carry regular traffic, to the Isle of Wight.
1985: Single-mode fiber spreads across America to carry
long-distance telephone signals at 400 million bits
per second and up.
Summer 1986: All 1500 Biarritz homes connected to fiber to the
home system.
October 30, 1986: First fiber-optic cable across the English Channel begins
service.
1986: AT&T sends 1.7 billion bits per second through single-mode
fibers.
Early 1987: David Payne reports making the first erbium-doped
optical fiber amplifier at the University of Southampton.
November 1987: Emmanuel Desurvire develops model to predict behavior
of erbium optical amplifier at Bell Labs.
January 1988: Eli Snitzer reports that erbium amplifiers can be
pumped at 1.48 micrometers.
1988: Linn Mollenauer of Bell Labs demonstrates soliton
transmission through 4000 kilometers of singlemode
fiber.
December 1988: TAT-8, first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, begins
service using 1.3-micrometer lasers and singlemode
fiber.
Early 1989: Emmanuel Desurvire measures very low crosstalk
when signals are transmitted through an erbium
amplifier at two separate wavelengths, pointing toward
wavelength division multiplexing.
November 1989: NTT reports gain of 46.5 decibels in erbium amplifier
excited by 1.48 micrometer laser.
January 1990: KDD transmits 2.4 billion bit per second signals at 4
wavelengths through 6 erbium amplifiers and 459
kilometers of fiber.
February 1991: Neal Bergano of Bell Labs transmits five billion bits
per second through 9000 kilometers of fiber. That
design later selected for TAT-12 cable.
February 1991: Masataka Nakazawa of NTT sends soliton signals
through a million kilometers of fiber.
February 1991: Mollenauer transmits solitons at two wavelengths
through 9000 kilometers of fiber.