1/spl times/N fiber bundle scanning switch

Summary form only given. Fiber-optic telecommunications networks will continue to increase in size and complexity, especially as local exchange companies begin to deploy fiber-in-the-loop. A single OTDR can perform line monitoring of thousands of fibers using an out-of-band wavelength and a 1 /spl times/ N opto-mechanical switch. Currently, such switches use a mechanical actuator to move a collimated input fiber across a sequence of individually lensed output fibers. This design yields reliable, repeatable, stable, and efficient switches. However, it does not scale to very large N because most of the cost comes from aligning individual focus lenses to each output. We show a more cost-effective approach to building large 1 /spl times/ N switches, where the input and all output fibers are carried in a fiber bundle and share a single lens. The input light is collimated and directed into a two axis scanner.