In Japan there is already considerable deployment of high bit rate DWDM systems in the long haul network. As such, with the continuing growth of Internet traffic, the metro network has recently become a significant bottleneck in end-to-end voice and data transmission. In order to resolve the kind of traffic demand emerging, service providers have begun installing WDM systems in the metro network. These systems need low-cost attenuators offering fine-grained, precise attenuation and low wavelength dependence loss to balance the transmitted power from channel to channel. These requirements make it difficult to use attenuators based on currently available technologies. In this paper, we report on the development of a technique for generating accurate optical fiber attenuators up to 5 dB using fusion splice technology using existing splicers. In laboratory tests, we have obtained +/- 10% attenuation tolerance with extremely low wavelength dependence loss from the O-band through the L-band.
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