Hundreds of millions of kilometers of optical fiber is installed throughout the world with an impressive history of mechanical reliability and optical performance. This paper summarizes some of the results of extended environmental aging studies of single mode silica glass optical fibers.
Optical fibers deployments starting in the 1980s has enabled the transmission of multi Gbps transmission bandwidths over thousands of kilometers. It can be argued that historically optical fiber has had a useful technical life where its optical performance limits transmission upgrade options.
