Trends in Electro-optical Communication Systems

Telecommunications networks are the largest and most complex artificial structures the human race has ever built and have gradually become an essential social and economic infrastructure. The worldwide demand for communication has consistently pushed the transport speed from merely 34 Megabit/s in the early eighties to 10 Gigabit per second today, i.e. a growth of a factor 10 each seven years. The growing demand for communication is mainly due to the trend towards globalisation and the evolution of the social structure of our society. Presently, we witness a revolution towards a global information society, which is most clearly visible by the very rapid introduction of the Internet, and of wireless communication equipment.