Multimedia and multiservice systems for home, office, and industrial networks

The optical transmission of signals has several significant advantages like high transmission capacity, immunity from electromagnetic interference, and thin and low weight cables. Optical networks have a high potential for applications in buildings, but they will be widely used only if component and installation costs are reduced. One promising candidate especially for home networks is polymer optical fiber (POF) due to the low cost of the fiber and its installation, as well as significantly lower costs of all active and passive components compared to networks based on silica fibers. The present paper describes the properties of polymer optical fibers (POF), active and passive components developed in our institute for networks based on POF as well as different transmission experiments. The applications of these transmission systems for multimedia and multiservice networks are the distribution of video signals, the transmission of TV signals with carrier frequencies beyo nd the 3-dB bandwidth of POF, and a multimedia system for the transmission of video, audio, and data signals using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)