An optical link is a communications link that consists of a single end-to-end optical circuit. A cable

Cable

A cable is two or more wires running side by side and bonded, twisted or braided together to form a single assembly. In mechanics cables, otherwise known as wire ropes, are used for lifting, hauling and towing or conveying force through tension. In electrical engineering cables are used to carry...

 of optical fiber

Optical fiber

An optical fiber is a flexible, transparent fiber made of a pure glass not much wider than a human hair. It functions as a waveguide, or "light pipe", to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber. The field of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of...

, possibly concatenated into a dark fiber

Dark fiber

A dark fiber or unlit fiber is an unused Optical fiber, available for use in fiber-optic communication.The term dark fiber was originally used when referring to the potential network capacity of telecommunication infrastructure, but now also refers to the increasingly common practice of leasing...

 link, is the simplest form of an optical link.

Other forms of optical link can include single-"colour" links over a wavelength division multiplex infrastructure, and/or links that use optical amplifier

Optical amplifier

An optical amplifier is a device that amplifies an optical signal directly, without the need to first convert it to an electrical signal. An optical amplifier may be thought of as a laser without an optical cavity, or one in which feedback from the cavity is suppressed...

s to compensate for attenuation over long distances.

Other forms of optical links include free-space optical communication

Free-space optical communication

Free-space optical communication is an optical communication technology that uses light propagating in free space to transmit data for telecommunications or computer networking."Free space" means air, outer space, vacuum, or something similar...

 links.

Also in the railways optical is used in two forms depending upon the whether the feeding station is main or not. Thus for main stations it is sain to be long hall and for all remaining stations it is to be short hall.

See also

• Light Peak
  Light Peak
  Thunderbolt is an interface for connecting peripheral devices to a computer via an expansion bus. Thunderbolt was developed by Intel and brought to market with technical collaboration from Apple Inc. It was introduced commercially on Apple's updated MacBook Pro lineup on February 24, 2011, using...
  
  
• Optical interconnect
  Optical interconnect
  Optical interconnect is a way of communication by optical cables. Compared to traditional cables, optical wires are capable of a much higher bandwidth, from 10 Gb/s up to 100 Gb/s....
  
  
• Parallel optical interface
  Parallel optical interface
  A parallel optical interface is a form of fiber optic technology aimed primarily at communications and networking over relatively short distances , and at high bandwidths....
  
  
• Interconnect bottleneck
  Interconnect bottleneck
  The interconnect bottleneck, the point at which integrated circuits reach their capacity, is expected sometime around 2010.Improved performance of computer systems has been achieved, in large part, by downscaling the IC minimum feature size. This allows the basic IC building block, the transistor,...
  
  
• Optical communication
  Optical communication
  Optical communication is any form of telecommunication that uses light as the transmission medium.An optical communication system consists of a transmitter, which encodes a message into an optical signal, a channel, which carries the signal to its destination, and a receiver, which reproduces the...
  
  
• Optical cable
• Transimpedance amplifier
• Photo diode
• VCSEL
  VCSEL
  The vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser, or VCSEL , is a type of semiconductor laser diode with laser beam emission perpendicular from the top surface, contrary to conventional edge-emitting semiconductor lasers which emit from surfaces formed by cleaving the individual chip out of a...
  
  
• PIN diode
  PIN diode
  A PIN diode is a diode with a wide, lightly doped 'near' intrinsic semiconductor region between a p-type semiconductor and an n-type semiconductor region. The p-type and n-type regions are typically heavily doped because they are used for ohmic contacts....
  
  
• Green computing
  Green computing
  Green computing or green IT, refers to environmentally sustainable computing or IT. In the article Harnessing Green IT: Principles and Practices, San Murugesan defines the field of green computing as "the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers,...
  
  
• InfiniBand
  InfiniBand
  InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Its features include high throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover, and it is designed to be scalable...
  
  
• InfiniBand Trade Association
  InfiniBand Trade Association
  The InfiniBand Trade Association is the standards organization that defines and maintains the InfiniBand specification. It is an industry consortium....
  
  
• Fibre channel
  Fibre Channel
  Fibre Channel, or FC, is a gigabit-speed network technology primarily used for storage networking. Fibre Channel is standardized in the T11 Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards , an American National Standards Institute –accredited standards...
  
  
• HDMI
  HDMI
  HDMI is a compact audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed digital data. It is a digital alternative to consumer analog standards, such as radio frequency coaxial cable, composite video, S-Video, SCART, component video, D-Terminal, or VGA...
  
  
• PCI Express
  PCI Express
  PCI Express , officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards...
  
  
• Active cables
  Active Cables
  Active cables are copper cables for data transmission that use a silicon chip to boost the performance of the cable. Without a chip, a cable is considered a 'passive' cable. Passive cables are liable to degrade the data they carry, due to such "channel impairments" as attenuation, crosstalk and...
  
  
• Small form-factor pluggable transceiver
• Terabit Ethernet
  Terabit Ethernet
  Terabit Ethernet or 1TbE is a phrase used in current media to describe the next possible speed of Ethernet above 100 Gigabit Ethernet speeds. Facebook, and Google are a few companies that have expressed a need for 1TbE...
  
  
• 100 Gigabit Ethernet
  100 Gigabit Ethernet
  40 Gigabit Ethernet, or 40GbE, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, or 100GbE, are high-speed computer network standards developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers . They support sending Ethernet frames at 40 and 100 gigabits per second over multiple 10 Gbit/s or 25 Gbit/s lanes...
  
  
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
  10 Gigabit Ethernet
  The 10 gigabit Ethernet computer networking standard was first published in 2002. It defines a version of Ethernet with a nominal data rate of 10 Gbit/s , ten times faster than gigabit Ethernet.10 gigabit Ethernet defines only full duplex point to point links which are generally connected by...
  
  
• Optoelectronics
  Optoelectronics
  Optoelectronics is the study and application of electronic devices that source, detect and control light, usually considered a sub-field of photonics. In this context, light often includes invisible forms of radiation such as gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared, in addition to visible light...
  
  
• Data center
  Data center
  A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems...
  
  
• High-performance computing
  High-performance computing
  High-performance computing uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.-Overview:...
  
  
• Cloud computing
  Cloud computing
  Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
  
  
• CXP (connector)
  CXP (connector)
  In the field of computer networking, CXP is a copper connector system with twelve 10 Gbit/s links suitable for 100 Gigabit Ethernet, three 40 Gigabit Ethernet channels, or twelve 10 Gigabit Ethernet channels. or a single Infiniband 12× QDR link. The C is the Roman numeral for 100 as a memory...
  
  
• Active Cables
  Active Cables
  Active cables are copper cables for data transmission that use a silicon chip to boost the performance of the cable. Without a chip, a cable is considered a 'passive' cable. Passive cables are liable to degrade the data they carry, due to such "channel impairments" as attenuation, crosstalk and...
  
  
• C Form-factor Pluggable
  C Form-factor Pluggable
  The C form-factor pluggable is a multi-source agreement to produce a common form-factor for the transmission high-speed digital signals...
  
  
• Fiber-optic communication
  Fiber-optic communication
  Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of light through an optical fiber. The light forms an electromagnetic carrier wave that is modulated to carry information...
  
  
• List of device bandwidths