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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..."
So let me get this straight; all the dark fibre we have in the states is now obsolete and therefore useless? Great, thanks, just checking.
"Don't bother lighting it up now, boys, just chop it up good when we start laying the new stuff."
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Interesting quote:
Maybe I'm just naive (probably), but the limiting factor today for broadband Internet access is the cost of the bandwidth, possibly due to the stranglehold a few key companies have on access to their backbones. The cable that comes into my house can be used for speeds in excess of 30Mbps, if I recall correctly, yet I have a mere 1.5-2Mbps (at $39.95/mo). Admittedly, DSL has technical limitations on speed, but even so, the large limiting factor seems to be the cost of an OC-12/48/96 connection to the 'Net, right?
When is that gonna change?!? What is needed to bring about that change? Regulation?
Single-mode fiber has a mixture of materials that have varying indices of reflection, so that the cable is a light guide instead of a light tunnel. This allows for a shorter path because the light is kept closer to the middle. Btw, the latency of copper is much, much greater than typical single or multimode fiber because of capacitive and inductive coupling. Fiber mainly has the advantage of higher bandwidth and noise immunity, but it wont ever reduce you ping beyond (distance / c).
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I'll admit that I didn't do the math to re-check this, but I seem to remember the velocity of electrons in copper wire being on the order of a few cm/second - much less than the speed of light. The confusion my be coming from the fact that when you stick an extra electron in the end of an otherwise neutrally charged wire, the spare charge sets up an electrical field that pushes a different electron out the other end (assuming it's grounded or generally has another place to go to). It's the electrical field that travels at the speed of light, not the electrons themselves.
>In fact, as light in fibre optic cabling bounces off the insides of the plastic tubing, it takes a less direct route and thus technically has a _higher_ latency than copper wire.
Ummm.. not quite. It's true that the light bounces around inside the fiber, but due to the low index difference between the core of the fiber and it's surrounding cladding the angle of the bounce is pretty small and wouldn't really increase the distance the light needs to travel The distance increase is proportional to 1/cos[angle] so when the angle is near zero, cos[angle] is near 1 and 1/cos[angle] is pretty near 1 meaning no big change in the distance traveled by Joe Photon. For electrical wires, speed is limited by the capacitance/inductance ratio of the cable and is typically around 2-3 times slower than free-space light.
All in all, it's a good thing that electrons don't go the speed of light in our house wiring - I used to work with a synchrotron, which is a device that gets the electrons moving at relativistic speeds, and whenever the beam of elecrons went around a corner it produced enough X-rays due to the angular acceleration to flash-fry a horse. Be glad that copper wire electrons are slow, since if they were fast we'd get cooked every time a bit of house wiring was anything less than perfectly straight.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if the main issue is the latter. I have spent some time trying to convince one of my coworkers at a major computer hardware company to get broadband, but he doesn't think he needs it. The uses of broadband are not necessarily obvious if you don't have it.
I also read that several telecoms will try to address this issues by selling capped broadband at a lower price.
Until we get the internet it's self running in gigabit (1000megabit or better) and have buttloads of bandwidth out there ala the full scale release and switch to Internet2 and ipv6, and replace all the routing and switching gear to the new gigibit or higher stuff it means nothing.. too many people are spoiled with T1 or better speeds into their homes while many many businesses have a 256-512 Kbit connection MAX due to the huge costs with a real net connection. (that is approx $1000.00 a month.. with yout fractional T1 and ISP access costs...)
... but I doubt that it will impact the costs of the fiber it's self, termination or maintaince.
fiber into the home.... WHY? is it needed? no.. will it be needed ? not for at least 10-15 years. and it wont be useful to anyone for a lot longer than that. The cost of laying fiber is not the cost of the fiber... it's the cost of directional boring or the manual labor to install it... regular old "expensive" glass fiber is dirt cheap. and most places lie down 24 or 48 count fiber when they only need 1 or 2 of them.. as the cost difference is minimal. (plus you can make gobs of cash selling the dark to other companies)
Plastic fiber is a neat idea
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.