This is a neat item. It allows us to completely catch up to the present state of the art.
When this technology was reported back in the mid seventies, i understood immediately that is eliminated the bottle neck imposed by our then telephone lines. From that point onward it was a case of watching a certain winner. sometimes to grew wildly then others it merely consolidated while the market ate up surplus broadband.
At present the technology is been implemented in the overall residential market. This will have the ultimate advantage of securing communication from any form of EMP attack. Nice by product and it removes that vulnerability.
Awareness of the EMP risk would also have induced the steady substitution of electric devices with their shielded equivalents. Even then an EMP attack is mostly recoverable with ample access to comms.
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Fiber optics
|
High-tech glass
If
you’re reading this, it’s thanks to the work of fiber optics. These
ultra-thin glass or plastic cables transmit light at high speeds,
delivering energy and information around the world. They power global
telecommunications, deliver streaming content from remote server farms
to our living rooms, and whisk emails from New York City to Seoul in
seconds.
Fiber-optic cables use reflection to
transmit data at light speeds. It may sound simple, but it took
centuries of development to make them work for the amount of data that
broadband internet requires, and the materials science continues to
expand. Not everyone has access to these tiny wonders, though. In the US, deregulation has allowed communications infrastructure to stagnate. The UK has set a goal to deliver fiber throughout the country by 2033, which prime minister Boris Johnson has called “laughably unambitious.” Let’s take a lightning-quick tour through the world of fiber optics.
25,000: Telephone calls that can be carried by a single strand of fiber-optic cable
9 microns: Diameter of the core of a single-mode fiber-optic cable125 microns: Diameter of the cladding (outside of cable) of a single-mode fiber-optic cable
50 or 62.5 microns: Diameter of the core of a multimode fiber-optic cable
>80%: Share of homes and businesses China is planning to connect to fiber optics
25: US rank out of 40 nations among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for average internet download speeds
$25–40: Monthly price of internet plans in Tokyo, Oslo, Singapore, and Hong Kong
80%: Share of the world’s long distance telecommunications traffic carried via fiber-optic cables at the end of the 20th century
80 milliseconds: Time it takes for a signal to travel from Europe to the US and back on underwater data cables
10 millionfold: Factor by which the speed of fiber-optic cables has increased since 1980
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File
explain it to me like i'm 5!
Fiber optics
Fiber-optic cables send light signals down a glass or plastic fiber thinner than a strand of hair. Reflective cladding surrounding that core boosts the signal in a technique called “total internal reflection.”
The speed of the light passing down the cable is determined by the
index of refraction in the core, which traps the light at an optimal
angle for speed. The outermost part of the cable is called the buffer,
which protects the fiber from physical damage.
To turn the data and energy into
light, the optical fiber is connected to a transmitter that converts the
electrons into photons, which travel down the cable until they reach a
receiver that decodes the signal back into digital information.
There are two types of optical fibers: single mode and multimode.
Single-mode fiber-optic cables have extremely thin cores that only
allow one wavelength—or mode—to travel down the fiber. Multimode
fiber-optic cables have larger cores that several wavelengths can be
transmitted through at once.
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quotable
“When
I was a high school student at Dehradun in the beautiful foothills of
the Himalayas, it occurred to me that light need not travel in a
straight line, that it could be bent.” 
brief history
1791: Claude Chappe invents the “optical telegraph,” sending messages from one tower to another through a series of lights.
1854: John Tyndall proves that light can be conducted through a curved stream of water.1880: Alexander Graham Bell invents a “photophone” that transmits voice signals through light.
1920s: John Logie Baird patents the use of transparent rods to transmit images for television, while Clarence W. Hansell uses the same technique to create facsimiles.
1930: Heinrich Lamm transmits the first image—a lightbulb—through a group of optical fibers.
1955: Narinder Singh Kapany coins the term “fiber optics” while working on his doctorate thesis.
1964: Charles Kao discovers that pure glass reduces light loss and can send fiber-optic signals over much further distances. He later won the 2009 Nobel Prize for this discovery.
1970: Corning Glass Works invents the first single-mode fibers small enough for telecommunications.
1973: Bell Laboratories develops a manufacturing process for the mass production of optical fiber.
1975: The US government links the computers at NORAD headquarters using fiber optics.
1977: The first telephone fiber-optic system is installed under downtown Chicago.
1987: Sprint becomes the first 100% fiber optic network in the US.
1988: The first transatlantic telephone fiber-optic cable goes into operation.
1990s: Photonic
crystal fiber is developed, providing speedier telecommunications as
well as promoting several other important scientific applications and
discoveries.
When will the US get wired?
Close to two-thirds of Asia will soon have fiber-optic access, compared to just 13% in the US. As Susan Crawford, author of Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It, explains to Recode,
US internet providers have little to no competition in local markets,
so they have little to no incentive for the considerable infrastructure
costs required for a fiber upgrade.
Kansas City turned into a tech startup hub
after Google Fiber selected it as a rollout location in 2010, wiring
businesses, schools, and residents for high speed internet. Since then
the tech giant has essentially stopped expanding the network
outside of the 16 cities in which it currently offers fiber. That’s why
some observers believe that the only way to expand fiber access is to
look to local utilities or municipal governments and treat the service like electricity or water.
watch this!
Transatlantic journey
Underwater
data pipes connect Europe to the US in a loop that runs under the North
Atlantic from Denmark to New Jersey, and back to the UK. Vice
interviews a transmission engineer at control center in Jutland,
Denmark.
Climate change vs. the internet
Increased
atmospheric temperatures and rising sea levels from global warming pose
a threat to the infrastructure that keeps the internet functioning.
Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables are buried underground, and as
flooding increases along the coastlines of North America, these cables
could be damaged, which scientists predict could happen as soon as 2030.
We’ve seen a preview. During Superstorm Sandy in 2012, flooding in New York City drowned underground cables. Verizon had cable vaults that suffered a “catastrophic failure” from the floodwater.
fun fact!
A group of engineers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a way to view molecular bonds with a resolution as small as one nanometer using fiber-optic cables, opening up new information to nanoscience researchers.
The future of fiber optics
Photonics
(using light to transfer information) makes fiber-optic cable fast,
cool, and efficient, but eventually it runs into a computer’s slow, hot,
copper pipes. So why can’t we just make a fiber-optic computer? Photons are really big, at least compared to electrons. One optical switch on a computer chip can take up as much space as 10,000 transistors.
But scientists are trying to put glass wherever they can. Ayar Labs, born at MIT, claims its optoelectronic chip would save big data centers 30-50%
on energy use. And earlier this year, researchers at the University of
California, San Diego made an optical waveguide out of three layers of
atoms, “500 times thinner than what’s in use today.”
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