John Long, VP of Integrated Systems
The one word that usually comes to mind when the topic of fiber-optic cable comes up is “speed”—the kind of blinding speed needed in high-performance computing for within-box processing as well as between-box communications. Fiber optics has been adopted as the basic clay of the telecommunications and commercial IT industries, not to mention thousands of miles of high-performance optical networks currently connecting corporations and research institutions around the world.
Aerospace and defense has begun to embrace fiber-optic designs, particularly airborne applications, with naval and ground mobile also coming on board. While the technical need for fiber is driven by high-speed processing, fiber optics offers other benefits aside from simple speed, some of which pack a significant punch in aerospace and defense applications. These benefits do, however, require expertise in the handling of fiber-optic cable in order to prevent difficult-to-diagnose failures.
