We live in the “Communications Age” – rapid access to information and connectivity to each other, anytime, nearly everywhere. But despite the massive strides that have been made in the past half century – from hardline telephony to the current ubiquitous wireless “smart” device connectivity – there is still further evolution to come that will necessitate extending the communications reach even further. While we have laid down a large physical infrastructure of wireline fiber-optic networks and wireless cellular base stations, the next advances in communications, 5G and machine-to-machine communications, will require “help from above” to blanket literally every corner of our planet with high speed, ultra-low latency, secure networks – telecom meet satcom.

Channel skip filters are components added to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) add/drop modules — in both coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) applications — to facilitate band splitting and to manage multiple ITU channels.

These filters feature narrow transitions from pass band to blocking band, minimizing lost channels while maintaining high spectral efficiency (i.e., limiting insertion loss) since the express channels undergo only one reflection.