Appeal No. 96-3628
Application 08/050,029
We will not sustain the rejection of claims 1 and 3 through 9 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103 in view of Ballance and Husbands because, in our view, the examiner has not
established a prima facie case of obviousness.
The examiner offers Ballance as teaching the claimed invention, with regard to
claims 1 and 4 through 7, but for “connecting the output of the TDMA master station
connected to respective inputs of the transmitters and output of the receivers connected in
parallel to a data input of the TDMA master station” [answer-page 4]. The examiner
contends that Ballance does teach connecting the system to various end users and that
after reaching a limit to the number of end users that can be connected by using the
splitters disclosed by Ballance, in order to increase that number further, one would add
optical components, citing various portions of Ballance in columns 8, 10, 14 and 21.
Apparently, the examiner is contending that the provision of additional transmitters
and receivers by Ballance, citing column 21, lines 28-32 of that patent, is a teaching of the
connection of a single head-end to a plurality of optical fiber networks, as claimed.
However, the additional optical components referred to at column 20 of Ballance is in
conjunction with an embodiment of Ballance’s invention wherein additional wavelengths
are used in order to add new services, such as cable TV. There is no indication or
suggestion that additional optical fiber networks are contemplated by Ballance. Both
instant independent claims 1 and 4 require more than one optical fiber network and there
is no indication anywhere in the disclosure of Ballance that Ballance contemplates
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