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:Speed of light?

[SkewlD00d]

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).