An optical link is a telecommunications link that consists of a single end-to-end optical circuit. A cable of optical fibers, possibly concatenated into a dark fiber link, is the simplest form of an optical link.
Other forms of optical link can include single-"colour" links over a wavelength-division multiplexing infrastructure, and/or links that use optical amplifiers to compensate for attenuation over long distances.
Other forms of optical links include free-space optical telecommunication links.
In the rail transport sector, optical links are used in two forms depending on whether the feeding station is a main station or not. Thus main stations are called 'long halls', and all remaining stations are said to be 'short halls'.
See also
100 Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet Active cable Cloud computing CXP (connector) C form-factor pluggable Data center Fibre channel Fiber-optic communication Green computing HDMI High-performance computing InfiniBand InfiniBand Trade Association Interconnect bottleneck Light Peak List of device bandwidths Optical communication Optical cable Optoelectronics Parallel optical interface Photo diode PIN diode PCI Express Small form-factor pluggable Terabit Ethernet Transimpedance amplifier VCSEL
References