The development of any new technology faces a conundrum: when to develop standards. Standards can facilitate the acceptance of a new technology or stifle its development, depending on your point of view. When fiber optic use began in the late 1970s, there was much debate about whether it was time for standards.

Standards are needed

By the time the EIA (Electronics Industry Association, which after a merger became TIA, the Telecommunications Industry Association) started a committee for fiber optic standards in the early 1980s, there were already four different types of fiber and maybe a dozen connectors in use. There were no standards for testing or agreed-upon tests that needed to be performed. 

Those of us in the industry knew we needed to get started on standards before the technology became too diverse and customers became confused. Users needed to feel confident that fibers or connectors they bought from different manufacturers were compatible and interchangeable.

EIA began holding fiber optic standards committee meetings three times a year. The early focus was on component specifications and how you measure them. While that may sound straightforward, it is not easy to measure the outside diameter of a hair-thin transparent filament of glass. It is even harder to measure the diameter and centering of the even smaller core embedded inside the glass. Testing the loss of a splice or connection required precisely controlling the way light is transmitted in the fiber. 

The technology was all very complex. Without the participation of the companies such as Corning and AT&T making fibers, it would have been impossible. Companies sent their technical experts to standards meetings and freely shared their knowledge and experience to facilitate the standards process. 

My participation as a manufacturer of test equipment and training as a physicist allowed me to contribute. My participation in the meetings provided a contact that solved one of the bigger standards problems that we faced. While working on a military project, we found that fiber optic power meters made in Japan and in the United States were measuring optical power with a difference of 3 decibels (dB)—a factor of two. The reason was that there were no international standards for optic power in fiber optics, so we all needed to develop calibration standards.

How they were developed

From the EIA standards meetings, we knew the staff at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards were involved in optical fiber. We convinced them the lack of standards was a major problem for the industry, and they funded a project to develop a primary standard for calibrating fiber optic power meters. It took three years and many trips to the NBS office in Boulder, Colo., to work out the details for calibration. Today, the same methods are used to calibrate fiber optic instruments worldwide. This also led me to write an EIA standard on measuring power that is still in use.

Testing was part of most standards. Once you defined the specifications of components, how to test them became the issue. First, it was important to define how to test loss or attenuation, define test conditions and determine measurement uncertainties. Then standards needed to test components such as fiber, cable and connectors under varying conditions including temperature, stress, moisture and other parameters.

While writing standards, you need to verify that they work. This means running a round-robin test where a set of components is passed around so many participants can perform tests and compare the results. Besides ensuring the validity of the standards, these tests showed uncertainties in the measurements and sometimes problems with the components.

It took about 10 years for the majority of standards to be written. These EIA/TIA standards became the basis of international standards by ISO and other standards organizations. They helped drive worldwide acceptance of fiber optics because users had confidence in components’ performance and interoperability among manufacturers’ products.

My online column this month talks more about standards.

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