High definition television transmission on single mode fibre for the local loop

An experimental digital system for HDTV transmission is demonstrated to provide high performance transmission of a single HDTV channel over single mode fibre. The full NHK format signal necessitates a digital transmission rate of 864 Mbit/s which is comfortably within the constraints of current component technology. However, the time division multiplexing of several such HDTV channels (without compression) onto a single fibre channel would require a substantially higher transmission rate which could present difficulties with currently available electronic component technology. Following a theoretical performance study, the pulsed analogue techniques, PFM and SWFM, exhibited potential for HDTV transmission on single mode fibre. For NHK format signals these modulation schemes have a bandwidth requirement of 216 MHz and exhibit a similar overall performance to that of the eight bit PCM system. Hence for both single channel operation, and particularly the multiplexing of several HDTV channels onto a single fibre, these techniques would appear to offer promising alternative solutions to digital transmission