A fully automatic, high-speed splicing machine for optical fiber ribbons has been developed to construct high-count optical cable lines in subscriber loops. Design procedure and detail performance of this machine is discussed in this paper. The developed machine achieves an average splice loss of less than 0.1 dB and a splicing time of about 2 min. for multi-mode five-fiber ribbons.

Mass fusion splice without accurate fiber-core alignment for splicing single-mode fiber ribbon in subscriber optical cable is discussed. Using the surface tension effect in the fusion process positively and suppressing the fiber length variance among fibers in the ribbon, low splice loss of about 0.1 dB was achieved for fibers with small core eccentricity.

A new stapler-type fiber cutting tool for obtaining good fiber end surfaces is described. T he size of the tool is about 2 cm wide, 3 cm high, and 10 cm long. The weight is only 90 g. In principle, the fiber is scored and than fractured by applying the tensile stress and bending stress simultaneously. The optimum conditions for cutting the fiber are investigated: The blade pressure is from 15 to 32 g, tensile stress from 6 to 13 kg/mm2, and bending stress around 10 kg/mm2. The average breaking angle of 0.6is easily obtained. It is confirmed that the tool is fully endurable for use in field.

An extended desktop multimedia conference system named FREDERIC (File Retrieval Engineering on Distributed EnviRonment and Interactive Communication system) has been developed for international cooperative work by sharing CAD and image data among multi-point users. This paper describes the basic network design concept of utilizing the Internet as a best-effort service and ISDN as a high-speed guaranteed service. Service system requirements and designs were developed to access common databases and collaborative work of multimedia information those are shared by customers with desktop computers and to allow remote offices to use a plant walkthrough system. The performance of the prototype system especially focused on the file transmission time which is the key factor in developing and constructing the system. By applying the image compression technology of multi-tone entropy coding, it is shown that the short time CAD data transfer to meet the requirements can be achieved.

A new stuffing-pulling fusion technique for the mass fusion splicing of single-mode fibers is presented, where the fiber spliced-region is pulled after the fiber end faces are fused and stuffed to each other. The characteristic feature of this technique is that the stuffing and pulling strokes are varied, based on the observation of fiber end face gaps for every splice. This technique can reduce splice loss to a half in comparison with the conventional method.