An overview is given of how fiber optics technology has emerged from the drawing board into the marketplace over the last, roughly, 25 years, and how the low-cost bandwidth that fiber provides enables bandwidth-intensive applications such as access to multimedia information, customized television programming, and multimedia real-time communications and messaging. A prognosis for future applications in the environment of broadband, personalized communication services is also given.>

This paper describes requirements for a broad-band analog telemetry link for nuclear test monitoring. It also describes prototype hardware developed to meet these requirements.

This paper is a brief review of the principles of optical fiber systems to serve as an introduction to the specific application and technology papers in this issue. Fibers, transmitters, receivers, point-to-point transmission systems, multipoint buses, and sensor systems are discussed. Subsystems are reviewed in terms of thier input/ output characteristics.

In this paper four approaches to the calculation of error rates for optical fiber system repeaters are compared ("Exact" calculation, Monte Carlo simulation, Chernoff bounds and the Gaussian approximation). We conclude that the "Exact" and Monte Carlo calculations are in complete agreement. This allows the Monte Carlo results to be used to calibrate other methods. The relatively simple Chernoff bound is in very good agreement with the above, and should be used whenever computational facilities allow. For simpler calculations, or analytical expressions for the effects of parameter variations, the Guassian approximation gives a reasonable good estimate of the receiver sensitivity. However, it tends to underestimate the threshold setting and overestimate the optimal avalanche gain.

Recent inquiries into optical communication have raised questions as to the validity of classical detection and estimation theory for weak light fields. Helstrom [1] proposed that the axioms of quantum mechanics be incorporated into a quantum approach to optical estimation and detection. In this paper, we discuss two important results, the quantum equivalent of the minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) estimator and the quantum Cramér-Rao bound for estimation of the parameters of an electromagnetic field. The first result, a new one, is applied to linear modulation. We show that homodyning is the optimal demodulation scheme in that case. Parallels to the classical MMSE estimator are drawn. The Cramér-Rao bound, first derived in the quantum ease by Helstrom [1], is applied to specific estimation problems. Details are left to the references, but interesting results are presented.