Special Issue on Fiber Optics in Access Networks (FOAN), Held in Moscow, October 2010

Telecommunications networks throughout the transmission system are adopting fiberoptic technologies, because they are the most profitable part of the telecommunications infrastructure. Over time, with significant price reduction, optical technologies began to spread to all aspects of telecommunications. Currently, tremendous growth is being witnessed in the number of services to endusers of telecommunications networks. With a large number of services, the needs of end-users for bandwidth are also rising. Therefore, there is a basic rule to replace, as much as possible, short copper wires with an increasing proportion of fiber-optic cable in the subscriber fixed line of telecommunications networks. Using fiber-optic technology, where until recently there was a copper twisted pair, has its own specifics. The First International Workshop on Fiber Optics in Access Networks (FOAN 2010) was held in Moscow in October 2010 with the aim of gathering researchers and engineers who will provide more details about implementation specifics. The workshop was held within the ICUMT 2010 (International Congress on Ultra Modern Control Systems). The ICUMT is an annual international congress providing an open forum for researchers, engineers, network planners, and service providers in telecommunications and control systems targeted on newly emerging algorithms, systems, standards, services, and applications. The ICUMT is positioned as a premier international annual congress for the presentation of original and fundamental research and engineering results. The aim of the ICUMT is to bring together Russian and international players in telecommunications and control systems. The workshop was divided into two sessions, the first, called “Technology and Services,” aimed at showing the networks, services, and technologies in general. The second, entitled “System Performance and Optical Devices,” showed the recent events in this field. For this workshop, 15 articles were submitted; after the review process, 9 were accepted and presented, and 5 were selected for this special issue. The selected articles cover topics from a backbone network to top services, such as 3D (three dimensions) video.