Because it is capable of achieving extremely high bandwidth, it is an enabling technology for the Internet and telecommunication networks that transmit the vast majority of all human and machine-to-machine information.
[1] Airborne optical networks between high-altitude platforms are planned as part of Google's Project Loon and Facebook Aquila with the same technology.
In 1964, Charles Kao showed that to transmit data for long distances, a glass fiber would need loss no greater than 20 dB per kilometer.
A breakthrough came in 1970, when Donald B. Keck, Robert D. Maurer, and Peter C. Schultz of Corning Incorporated designed a glass fiber, made of fused silica, with a loss of only 16 dB/km.
"[7] Today, EDFAs and hybrid optical amplifiers are considered the most important components of wave division multiplexing systems and networks.
AT&T's Bell Labs developed a WDM process in which a prism splits light into different wavelengths, which could travel through a fiber simultaneously.
During signal regeneration, slight discrepancies in various frequencies introduced an intolerable level of noise, making WDM with greater than 4 channels impractical for high-capacity fiber communications.
[10] [11] Ciena developed the dual-stage optical amplifier capable of transmitting data at uniform gain on multiple wavelengths, and with that, in June 1996, introduced the first commercial dense WDM system.
[18] In 2018, Telstra of Australia deployed a live system that enables the transmission of 30.4 Tbit/s per fiber pair over 61.5 GHz spectrum, equal to 1.2 million 4K Ultra HD videos being streamed simultaneously.
[19] As a result of this ability to transport large traffic volumes, WDM has become the common basis of nearly every global communication network and thus, a foundation of the Internet today.
[20] [21] Demand for bandwidth is driven primarily by Internet Protocol (IP) traffic from video services, telemedicine, social networking, mobile phone use and cloud-based computing.