OPTICAL COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK

摘要

A passive, all optical communications network in which a single optical source in a central station serves many outstations (e.g. telephones in customer's premises). Time division multiplexed optical signals from a laser source are transmitted along a single optical fibre (6) from a central station (4). The signal is split between several secondary fibres at a first splitter (10) (e.g. array of passive couplers) and between further sets of fibres at a second set of splitters (12). At this stage there are 120 individual fibres to customer's premises (8). Digital speech or data is sent back to the central station by a laser in the customer's premises operating in a low duty-cycle mode. The 120 data streams are interleaved at the branching points.