Plastic Optical Fibre: Cheap and Bendy

Motivator_Bob writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on making optical fibres from plastic rather than the traditional glass."Advances in optical-fibre making at the Australian Photonics research centre could bring communications at the speed of light into Australian homes and businesses in the next few years. The advance - microstructured polymer optical fibres (MPOF) - allows the manufacture of optical fibres that are much smaller, cheaper, more rugged and easier to make than glass fibres..."

Comments

Re:So when do I get fiber in my house?

[SkewlD00d]

Because the cable company wants to sell you kable modem service, the telcos dont want to give up $1000/mnt T-1 contracts, and your city wants ISPs and telcos to pay exorbitant franchise fees.

Re:Dark Fibre?

[Spy Hunter]

No, all the dark fibre we have in the states may be lit up in the future because a cheaper new way of bridging the last mile has just been invented. There's no reason to replace already-installed fibre, it's not "obsolete".

Re:So? This is new?

[kmankmankman2001]

"Most of the things"? I'd like to see a better, more accurate, metric than that. Comparing consumer grade, short distance, optical cabling like TosLink stuff to carrier and data center cabling is misleading at best. Serious optical networking infrastructure still runs over glass fiber. The promise of a (presumably) cheaper and definitely thinner optical cabling option is very appealing. You've probably never seen the confluence of hundreds of cables under a single data center floor tile all bound for the same patch panel - it can be very difficult just to fit it all. This isn't due to the width of the fiber itself but the protective plastic cladding (usually in either yellow or orange depending on the type of fiber). And while glass is still a bit more flexible than the article would leave one thinking, in untrained hands it is quite easy to break. But don't kid yourself - today's optical networking infrastructure is definitely running over glass - and I've been awake a lot longer than the last 10 years.

Re:Dark Fibre?

[The_Sock]

I wanted to mod you down, but there is no option for "-1 Wrong". I sat and thought about this for a minute or two and here's the best I can come up with.

Wrong answers generate a good number of responses... corrections and such. This adds more comments total to the article. This will drive up the average comments per article. Articles with higher number of comments will make more people read the comments. This could again lead to even more comments. The responses correcting the misinformation will generally be modded "+1 Informative" or left alone, not modded down (nor should they be). People will not mod you off topic, troll or flamebait, because you are none of the above, you are just plain wrong. This will appear to give a better the signal to noise ratio, as there are now alot more positively moderated or non-negatively moderated posts. I say appear because comments such as these, though not modded down, are noise. The responses, though correct, also shouldn't be her, making them noise as well.

So we have: Appearance of a better signal to noise ratio, more comments per story, and more people reading these comments which equals more ad views and a higher chance of a click-through. These all looks better to advertisers and would be advertisers. This will lead to more ad clicks, and possibly better payout per ad click.

Conclusion:

The slashdot powers that be are purposefully leaving out the "-1 Wrong" moderation option to get more comments per story in order to generate more ad revenue.

Now, as for you being moderated up... well.. Apparently there's also a moderator out there who is "-1 Wrong".

Yes, it's the last mile and uptake.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I just read that telecoms have an excess of long haul bandwidth, which means that the issues are the cost of the last mile and consumer uptake.

Yes it's the lack of the "last mile" - and content worth paying for its instalation.

Lots of spare fiber (and empty conduit) was laid when the trenches were open, so most of it is dark. Boxes were bought to light up a few fibers, and even when they're all lit we can bump the speed to get a few more powers of two before stringing more long-haul.

But the network speeds and capacities of the first boxes were calculated using what turned out to be Netcom's overstatement of the rate of growth of the internet's bandwidth. For the last 5 or so years it was only doubling, rather than multiplying by 10.

Doubling every year is no slouch for a growth rate, but it's only about 1/3,125 the traffic the designers of the equipment and networks were planning for at this point. (It was 1/125 at the time of the dotcom bubble burst. Maybe some of those dotcoms WOULD have been profitable if the customer base they'd been told to expect actually existed?)

So there's a bandwidth price war at the wholesale level, telecoms folding up as debts come due without revenue to pay them, and equipment suppliers having a REALLY hard time selling any more stuff.

But with the CLECs pretty much all dead, the ILECs and cable companies (with the pre-installed base) have a virtual duopoly on the last mile. So there's no incentive to push cheap fat pipes into your hands. (Markets need THREE suppliers before competition starts driving costs toward price of production. With only two they'd be cutting their own throats to try to cut each others'.)

So there's no cheap last mile bandwidth. But there's virtually no high-bandwith content available to make it worth peoples' while to buy expensive last-mile bandwidth:

- CARP killed "internet radio".
- The RIAA killed Napster, is killing its clones, and finally going after individuals.
- The RIAA and MPAA are scared spitless of allowing any of their members' digital content on the net, for fear of piracy.

So what does that leave Joe Sixpack that will convince him to pay enough extra for high-speed internet that it's profitable to dig up his street and give him a fiber? Better animated popup ads? Most of the rest of the net is more than adequate at moderate speeds.

High-speed internet will be here as soon as there's a "killer app" requiring high-bandwidth that's popular enough to fund a new last-mile deployment, or a cheap-enough last-mile solution is found to be price-competitive with cable and ILEC-based DSL.