Abstract:
During the past 30 years optical fiber has provided a steadily increasing transmission bandwidth over long distances with the cost per bit falling rapidly at the same time. It is also due to this technological and commercial success that the Internet is so ubiquitous in our everyday live now.

For most of its time the capabilities of fiber transmission was dominated by the progress of high speed optical and electrical components. Consequently, up to ten years ago commercial optical fiber communications has been achieved exclusively with simple intensity modulation and direct detection, and error correction coding was only introduced a few years earlier. These days, however, more and more findings from the last decades of communication theory find their way into fiber transmission to ensure continuous progress.

After a short introduction into the basic principles of optical fiber systems, new developments will be discussed, starting from latest receiver technology, that has been introduced into commercial systems recently. Some research topics with the potential to sustain the pace of bandwidth increase of the previous decades will finish the talk.