Using a single optical fiber to transfer both power and data may prove to be appealing in applications in which traditional electric wires are impractical to use. The main challenge of such a transmission is the cross-talk between the strong, power-carrying light and the data-carrying signal, which is significantly weaker and very sensitive to variations in intensity.

The authors have used multimode fiber in which they transmit the power-carrying light in the lower-order modes and the data signal in higher-order modes. They are launched into the fiber via a combination of a central launch (power light) and offset launch (data signal). Besides using different mode groups for the two signals, the cross-talk suppression at the receiver side is aided by wavelength-division multiplexing, as the two signals are transmitted at different wavelengths. As a result, the authors demonstrated transmission of 54 Mbit/s data over a distance of up to 4 km.

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