Optical fibre principles

Target audience:

This course is intended for technical staff who are responsible for the installation and maintenance of optical fibre links.

 

Course prerequisites:

This course assumes a basic understanding of digital transmission and the use of decibels. It is recommended that the PTT courses "Analogue and digital signals " and "Signal impairments" are studied before attempting this course.

 

Course objectives:
By the end of this course you will be able to:

• describe the basic structure of an optical fibre and explain how infrared energy is propagated down the core of a fibre.
• describe the causes and effect of modal, chromatic and polarisation mode dispersion.
• describe and compare the structure and characteristics of step index multimode fibre, graded index fibre, and singlemode fibre.
• compare the characteristics and applications of various types of optical fibre as specified by the OSI/IEC and ITU.
• describe the role of the main components of an optical link including line terminal equipment, optical distribution shelf, and optical amplifiers.
• describe the role of the various protection layers employed in optical cables.
• explain the significance of the IEC classification of optical sources according to the hazard they present.
• explain the main causes of optical loss in a fibre transmission system and discuss methods of minimising those losses.
• calculate the power budget of an optical link taking into account receiver sensitivity, system margin and dispersion penalty.
• describe the principles of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and compare wideband, coarse, and dense WDM.

 

Approximate study time: 6 hours 

 

Delivery platform requirements:
To access the course, a computer/tablet running a browser such as Chrome, Safari, Edge etc. is required. The device should have an active Internet connection and a screen resolution of at least 1024x768.