Plastic optical fibers (POFs) are highly promising transmission media for future home networking. In comparison to glass optical fibers (GOFs), which are commonly used in core and metropolitan networks, POFs offer many advantages such as great flexibility and easy handling. This review begins with the basic concepts of optical fibers and moves on to the early history of loss reduction in POFs. What drastically changed the status of POFs in the communications field was a graded-index technology that improved the bandwidth to over 1 gigabits per second. However, even after the loss and bandwidth were enhanced to their limits, the performances of POFs were insufficient for market demand when using conventional optical polymer materials such as poly(methyl methacrylate). Recently, this problem has been solved by several lines of material research using fluorinated polymers. As a result, highspeed optical home networking by POFs has become more realistic. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 49: 2-17, 2011