Abstract

With the rapidly expanding availability of low-cost, sophisticated, digital terminal hardware and the trend toward distributed data acquisition and processing, there is a ground swell of activity in the development of local area networks (LAN) to provide Interconnect capability. The major focus of current activity is in the IEEE-802 committee. The emphasis is on baseband and broadband coaxial transmission media. However, because optical fiber systems utilize low-attenuation, broad bandwidth, and totally dielectric transmission media, they will complement current coaxial based networks and play a leading role in second-generation LANs having bandwidth distance products of ≥ 50 MBd km.

© 1982 Optical Society of America