Abstract
Optical fibre transmission systems have now largely replaced their copper forebears. This has been achieved by overlaying the copper pair and coaxial systems with optical fibre, thereby realizing vastly increased repeater spacing, smaller cable size, increased capacity and reliability, and orders of magnitude in reduction of costs. Despite these radical changes, the approach to network design, reliability and performance assessment has seen little change, merely a scaling of the established copper techniques, figures and assumptions, with minor modifications to accommodate the new family of optoelectronic components. The validity of this is questionable since the move from copper to glass has eradicated key failure mechanisms such as moisture and corrosion, while at the same time the considerable increase in repeater spacings has removed the need for power feeding and so has moved the reliability risks towards surface switching stations. Present system and network models do not reflect the full impact of these improvements or attach sufficient importance to the novel features of this new technology.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Cochrane, P., Heatley, D.J.T. (1996). System and Network Reliability. In: Cochrane, P., Heatley, D.J.T. (eds) Modelling Future Telecommunications Systems. BT Telecommunications Series, vol 7. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2049-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2049-8_11
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