This course provides a good understanding of the fundamentals of optical communications; both fiber optics and emerging optical wireless systems will be covered. Some of the topics are: high speed single mode and low speed multimode fibers, step and graded refractive index profiles, different dispersion mechanisms and their effect on high-speed links, advantage of coherent (LASER) light source over incoherent (LED) sources for long haul, high-speed links, photo detectors and their role in bit error rate (BER). Students will do design calculations for point to point and star type fiber optic networks, and they will also be introduced to Synchronous Optical Networks (SONET) and wavelength division multiplexing scenarios. Signal processing performance improvements will also be discussed.