City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

276 CITY OF LIGHT
February 1993: Mollenauer transmits 10 billion bits per second
through 20,000 kilometers of fibers with a simple
soliton system.
1994: World Wide Web grows from 500 to 10,000 servers.
February 1995: NTT transmits 10 billion bits per second on each of
16 wavelengths through 1000 kilometers of fiber
using dispersion compensation.
1995–1996: Internet traffic hits peak growth, doubling in 3–4
months.
February 1996: Fujitsu, NTT Labs, and Bell Labs all report sending
one trillion bits per second through single fibers in
separate experiments.
1996: Commercial wavelength-division multiplexing systems
introduced.
1996: TAT-12 transatlantic cable put in service, the first
with optical amplifiers.
October 1996: Lucent Technologies splits from AT&T, taking most
of Bell Labs.
May 15, 1997: Amazon.com has initial public offering of stock early
in Internet boom.
February 1998: NTT transmits 1 trillion bits per second through a
series of optical amplifiers and 600 kilometers of fiber;
Bell Labs does similar experiment through
400 kilometers of fiber.
1998: First long-distance submarine cables with
wavelength-division multiplexing. Commercial systems
transmit dozens of wavelengths at 2.5 billion
bits per second. Developers promise systems transmitting
10 billion bits per second on dozens of
channels.
February 1999: NTT reaches three trillion bits per second through
40 kilometers of fiber.
1999: NASDAQ average nearly doubles as the bubble
takes off.
March 7–10, 2000: NASDAQ hits record high of 5132.52. Optical Fiber
Communication Conference attracts record crowd
of 16,934 to Baltimore.
July 2000: Peak of telecom bubble. JDS Uniphase announces
plans to merge with SDL Inc. in stock deal valued
at $41 billion.
March 19–22, 2001: Optical Fiber Communication Conference attracts
record crowd of 38,015 to Anaheim, with 970
companies exhibiting.
March 22, 2001: NEC Corp. reports transmitting 10.92 trillion bits
per second through 117 kilometers of fiber.