Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Crawford Hill Lab, Holmdel, NJ 07733, USA: herwig@lucent.com Abstract Optical communication has advanced into the tera-era deploying 1/2 terameter of fiber and carrying several Tb/s per fiber. Remaining challenges include extending the success of point-to-point long-haul to metropolitan networks and broadband access applications. Introduction Reflecting on the past 15 years of optical communication, one can only marvel at the amazing advances in this technology and in its applications
