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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..."
Who still uses glass? I think all the commericial stuff out there is already plastic. I mean who wants to splice fiber every 10ms because someone breathed on it wrong?
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The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Because it's not cheap to dig up all the roads, etc, to get the fiber to your house.
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.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
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."
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.
Dammit, communicating over copper with electrical pulses is also at the speed of light (roughly). This is a painful but all-too-common misuse of terminology, confusing speed as in data rate with speed as in velocity. Damn marketing types.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
50 years after Einstein, and people still don't realise that the electrons in a piece of copper wire travel at the speed of light? 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.
I think the cost of installation, amplifiers, CSU's etc. will still hamper the spread of broadband.
from 56k->54M is ~1000x speed. the "future" they are preparing for is only a 2-20x jump. I'd say they should prepare for 54Gbit connections to people's homes, but hey, whatever.
at the same time, who here actually connects at 54Mbits, anyway?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This plastic optics fiber must have a higher index of refraction than glass, which increases Brewster's angle, which increases the amount of bend allowed before the signal is lost. This is no biggie, technologically speaking. The only reason it hasn't been done before is cost. Glass is very cheap and we know how to make thin strands of it already.
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?
Is this how they got "time" to bend around corners in the explosion in the movie, Time Machine?
I still have no clue who thought of the idea of time being fluid...
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Yeah, I don't want some wussy 300Mbps broadband. Where's my 10GB/s? This flexible fiber, according to the article, can cut the cost to lay last mile fiber. It's about time. Now, if we can only get an ISP to offer the service at that speed...
But it occurse to me that plastics are not yet to the point where you could put nearly as many modes through as traditional fiber..
It's for work only mind you. Multiple pipes running our web hosting network.
Then again, I have no idea who could possibly need this for home use. Even watching multiple streamed digital feeds from AOL's new world order couldn't fill that need. In short- that's a helluva lot of pr0n.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
For example- 3 years ago, i bought a external HP 1x-2x CD burner- 300.00 Now, I can get a 48X for 80.
56k modem new 5 years ago - 75.00 now - 12.00
It will take some time, but then again, it will also take some time to lay all that fiber.
I belive that in 7-10 years, 60%-80% of the US will have fiber to the door.
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Exec 1: Gee guys, with this cheaper fiber, we could roll out much better speeds than what we get on the copper we use now!
Execs #2 & #3: Woo-hoo, that'll really help us get a leg up on the competition!
Exec #1: Oh, wait... We don't have any competition. We don't have to share our lines with anyone, so no one else can get their foot in the door here. I guess we'll have to bonus our expansion money out to ourselves, instead.
Exec #2 (holding plastic fiber up to his eye) : Hey, Dick, I think I can see you through this thing. Neato. Somebody get me a martini.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
I'm not bragging so please don't take it that way, but my apartment in downtown Vancouver has fibre andI am quite happy with it. Costs me five dollars less a month than the cable connection that my sister has.
Just a quick note: there are two spellings to this: Fiber and Fibre. Fiber refers to the glass/plastic optical medium whereas Fibre refers to a type of communication, I believe. E.g. fibre channel, a popular method of high-speed connection for external drives. Nothing optical about it (though it can work over fiber-optic cables) and the protocol that runs over it can be SCSI (or anything else, such as TCP/IP).
When will (non-lagged via satellite) broadband come to the rest of us?
Groups of people need to organize and configure their own fiber networks. There's no financial gain - as a matter of fact it's a loss - for large companies to offer this technology when they're already running much smaller lines for huge rates.
There's plenty of stories from small communities who Telco's said couldn't get DSL that organized, purchased the necessary hardware, and now run inexpensive commercial-grade bandwidth to all their homes.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Dammit... I saw cheap and bendy and thought this was a Natalie Portman story. timothy, I rate you a -1 OffTopic!
The article mentions that the new fiber can bend more than traditional fiber optics... does that mean that it can bend past the critical angle for the material? With the traditional fiber optics the fiber would snap before reaching the critical angle so you are assured that the light will not leave the fiber channel because the fiber would physically break before you could bend it that far. If the new fibers can be bent past the material's critical angle then stupid human errors can occur and cause problems.
...given this announcement that people ought to get more fiber...
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
yes it is, hire my company and I'll to it for about $0.25/KM.
In an unrelated story, the price of Cu falls on world markets.
True enough for the consumer products but, how much of that is true for the commercial end OC-12's, fiber switches and so on? Of course, if there is no competition in the ISP market, none of this will mater.
The big problem with POF has always been that it has higher loss and dispersion than glass. Until those are solved POF is still going to be limited to very short distances.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
A hair's breadth from changing thee world
Advances N optical-fibre making @ thee Australian
Photonics research centre could bring communications @
thee speed uv light into Australian homes and
businesses N thee next few years.
Thee centre holds patents over a new way 2 make
optical fibres using plastic polymers instead uv thee
traditional silicon-based glass. (A polymer iz a big
molecule composed uv many smaller molecules strung N
long, repeating chains. Examples R DNA, proteins,
rubber, rayon and plastics.)
Thee advance - microstructured polymer optical fibres
(MPOF) - allows thee manufacture uv optical fibres
that R much smaller, cheaper, more rugged and easier 2
make than glass fibres because, N part, they don't
need thee added weight uv protective coatings.
Australian Photonics CEO Mark Sceats says thee new
plastic fibres R about thee width uv a human hair and
can turn through 90 degrees much more readily than
glass fibres. thee technology recently won thee
excellence-N-innov8shun award from telecomms magazine
CommsWorld.
Thee fibre's lower cost also makes it attractive 2
networking vendors who can replace copper coaxial
networks used N most buildings and homes. Optical
fibres will boost transmission speeds by several
orders uv magnitude, from 100Mbps 2 gigabits a second,
Sceats sez. Plastic-based optical fibres may also
permit carriers 2 jump thee curb, bridging thee last
hurdle 2 take high-speed 2-way Internet from thee
street 2 thee home instead uv using thee slower hybrid
fibre-coaxial (HFC) cable.
"Thee communication people want has been increasing
from 56kbps a few years ago 2 54Mbps now," Sceats
says. "N five 2 10 years we will talk about how 2
connect people up @ 100-1000Mbps. That's what we need
2 prepare for."
Carriers would no longer have 2 build huge trenches 2
lay fibre, he says, when a connection thee width uv a
fishing line would suffice.
Thee global downturn N telecommunications and IT works
2 Australia's advantage if we keep our eye on thee big
prize once a recovery occurs, he says.
"We shouldn't underestim8 thee amount uv capital we
will have 2 invest 2 B a player N these gaymes. That's
why getting N early enables us 2 scale up
manufacturing 2 a very high volume."
A problem thee industry faces iz an inability 2 get
test beds N place 2 prove thee technology, he says.
Also, it's not enough 2 B a research centre for
overseas companies, because @ thee first sign uv a
rocky economy, cuts R more likely 2 B made here then
close 2 a US or European headquarters.
"Now iz thee time 2 pump money n2 R&D. Because uv thee
time it takes 2 get 2 market, we have 2 B well
positioned 2 catch thee next wave. Its all about
getting these big fat pipes that were layed N North
America 2 people who want broadband - and real
broadband, not thee wussy broadband people R marketing
@ thee moment."
Actually the speed the electrons travel is directly related to the voltage. Roughly, at 1 volt an electron will travel 1 mm/sec on a copper conductor. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with the speed an electronic signal travels. By your logic I would need to actually recieve the electron (which would require huge DC power) that you send in order for me to get your signal. If the internet worked this way your ping times would be measured in months. An electron is charged. When it moves, the electron next to it moves out of it's way (like charges repel). The time it takes from when one electron moves and the other 'feels' it is equal to how long it takes light to travel between the two electrons. In essence, the force between electrons moves at the speed of light. They don't call it electromagnetism for nothin!
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.
The pipe into your house is not so big as to gain any benefit... 10/100 si fine for you.
...
I don't know about you, but my Cable modem isn't 10/100. It ranges anywhere from 0.1Mbps to 3Mbps down and only 0.4Mbps up (maximum cap)
as far as i know, the speed of light in glass is also less than the speed of light in a vacuum -- thus, both copper and glass (and plastic) fall short of "true" speed of light (in a vacuum) ...
actually, electron flow through copper wire in a circuit is nowhere NEAR the speed of light. I think it's more like a few feet per second... I could look it up, but I'm lazy.
I know it's not any kind of high velocity though.
but it's the elctrical impulse that travels near the speed of light, not the electrons themselves.. think of six billiard balls lined up with 1mm of space between each one. You hit the first one, how long does it take for the impulse to travel? How far do the balls themselves actually move? Not related at all.
2 years ago it costs approx.$1500 to set up an ISDN line in a clients office. thats 128k both directions.
today I just set up another client with two officed about 50 miles from each other with a T1 in both offices plus 6 voice lines each. one T1 is 256 the other 512. plus 16 IP's e-mail and such. If I were to call the local phone company and request this service I would be paying upwards of $1500 however with another company using the same exact lines as teh local company they can do it for $600 a month. why ? simple price fixing companies will always stretch technology as long as people are willing to pay. So even if all this wonderful fiber is available commercially I doubt companies will be willing to provide it to homes. keep in mind this involves trenching all over again. A more realistic option will be wireless with fiber running to each transmition point.
He said electrical impulses. And he's right.
the change in the electric field propagates at near the speed of light through copper. The fact that the electrons themselves flow is more of a byproduct.
"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.
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
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.
The cost might not go down, but the client base will go up and their margins on profit might even be smaller, but more customers *should* = more money.
Even the ghetto will have fiber to it's door, with the street dealers taking orders with 802.11(x) iPaq's for crack; and with the FED's downloading NetStumbler and tring to get in on the action.
GOOD TIMES!!!!
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
because by far the biggest cost assosiated with fiber/cables etc is digging up the road, and until that become cheaper or an alternative is found it will remain rediculously expensive still
but it's not true. You can bend traditional glass fiber well beyond the point where all refraction is lost and your signal vanishes.. well before it snaps.
Maybe on really old fiber.. but any sample I've seen in the last 10 years, it's been easy to bend it far enough to lose your signal without harming the fiber one bit.
The relevant quantity in fibers is the critical angle, beyond which all light is reflected inside the higher-index core. (Actually, the whole ray-optics picture is not completely accurate for fibers with features, like the core size, comparable to the wavelength...but it's qualitatively the right idea.) (Which, by the way, has nothing to do with the reflection disappearing from the puddle, since that is a reflection into the lower-index medium, air. The puddle effect has more to do with your shadow blocking the light.)
Note also, by the way, that it's not so much that the index of the polymer fiber core has been increased, its that the effective index of the cladding is decreased (by adding lots of thin holes/veins, hence the name microstructured fiber). And you can do the same thing with glass fibers. (Because of the higher effective contrast, you can confine light more tightly and e.g. enhance nonlinear effects.
(You were on the right track that it's the bending light loss, and the advantage therein of higher index contrast, that the article was referring to.)
Microstructuring can also go in the other direction to photonic crystal fibers and guiding light in air.)
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
...in the headline, I thought it was an article about legislators that can get laws passed for you.
"Derp de derp."
My favorite quote from the article:
"It's all about getting these big fat pipes that were laid in North America to people who want broadband - and real broadband, not the wussy broadband people are marketing at the moment."
A dig at Charter? AT&T? SWBell? Har!
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
"Fibre" is the french spelling of the word "Fiber." In english, the word is pronounced "FY-ber". In french, it's roughly pronounced "FIB-ruh".
The french version of this word belongs in an enlish sentence about as much as the russian equivalent does. Same thing goes for theatER. We don't say "THEE-a-truh" so let's not spell it that way.
If you want to make a sentence, pick one language for the whole thing please.
I have heard studies quoted that 95% of the 10Gbps ports will be for links 2km. And IIRC, more than half will be 600m. So for all the LAN, WAN, and even Metro area stuff, and for the "last mile" it sounds like this POF stuff may be just fine. Maybe they can just blow these "fishing lines" down the sewer pipes if it is cheap enough.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Im seeing alot of posts saying "so what? my toy has plastic fibers in it too"....
Unh huh..
The requirement for fiber optics are FLEXIBILLITY, PURITY, and STRENGTH. The toys with the plastic fiber, are impure and if used for data transmission would have errors in the stream at any length. Some plastic fibers cannot take flexing very well without cracking, and once agian, corrupting the data. How can these plastics handle being strung up on poles and maintain its integrity for years and years?
If this breakthrough works "down under", then Corning and the other major fiber makers might shift some of its facilities to start making plasfiber optics.
Then God and the almighty buck willing, the telcos and cable companies will start making curb drops with this plasfiber at the last mile and get rid of their detriorating copper conductors.
*sighs*
Now how to deal with a telco that has made a partial rollout with DSL in this commumity then flat out refused to cover the entire community with the DSL service. It can be either legal, or illegal, it just needs to be done.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Thanks for the correction...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Sigh... So many people just can't seem to think at all.
The real problem with optical fibers is that they transmit light.. Light is what you see with. Now, let's use our heads for a moment: You've got an optical fiber running from your bedroom to your ISP. What travels along that optical fiber? Light. That's right, folks, light. That means that people at the ISP can SEE you when you're NAKED.
Is that what you really want? Are you willing to pay for the privilege of exposing your bare bottom to the prying eyes of the sort of acne-scarred, socially dysfunctional, unbathed loners who work at ISPs? These people are, if you'll forgive the slur, sysadmins. It's not a nice thing to say, but it's a fact.
And they're watching you.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
...like CowboyNeal's mom. ;)
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
I live on the middle of the San Francisco peninsula (Belmont, to be precise, along 101), Oracle literally looms over my house, the area is strewn with .com startups and large tech companies. And I can only get IDSL (aka ISDN with DSL-style metering), because I'm 21,000 feet from the CO. Same thing applied when I lived 30 miles south in Sunnyvale, which is basically ground zero for Silicon Valley.
The problem isn't that the telco doesn't have the tech to give me a good connection. They do. They simply don't want to. If they're unwilling to spend the effort to splice a more convenient DSLAM in there somewhere, why, exactly, are they going to be willing to lay down miles and miles of fiber, no matter how awesome it is?
I've been doing some research involving fiber optics, lately, and so have come upon information and papers on plastic fiber. It's been around for awhile, so this isn't exactly new stuff... And while it is less fragile, it still has more attenuation than good ol' silica based fibers.
This is more of a fluff, "invest in us, because we're almost there", piece than a report of a real breakthrough.
As we all know, innovations in technology are picked up first by the adult industry. That said, perhaps this will allow inexpensive high-resolution cameras that can fit into "tight places" ?
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
every single digital optical cable I've ever seen is plastic.
I can assure you, as someone working in the telecom industry, that the fibers we're working with are glass.
Are you sure you're not confusing the fiber itself with the layers of plastic protective armor around it?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, electrical signals in the neighborhood of 10-100MHz propagate through copper at about 0.1C or (18,600 mi/sec or 30,000 km/sec).
That depends on the geometry. Use thicker copper and/or space it farther apart and the signal goes faster. A less lossy dilectric helps, too.
At low frequencies - i.e. where the stray resistance of the line's copper is small compared to the characteristic impedence - the speed is dominated by the dilectric constant of the space between the conductor - and you get your approximate 70% of lightspeed. At higher frequencies (or longer wire) the line acts progressively more like a series-resistors-parallel-capacitors delay line cum low-pass filter. This slows and attenuates the signal, the higher frequencies more than the lower ones.
Selective slowing (phase shift) of the higher frequencies smears out pulses, while selective attenuation weakens them compared to noise.
This can be compensated for to some extent (by amplifying and phase shifting the higher frequencies before transmission and after reception). But there's a limit to how much of that can be done: Too much at the transmitter and you exceed the allowable signal level for the wire (causing cross-talk into the weaker signals going the other way nearby). Go far enough out and the high-frequency signals get down near the noise level, so amplification at the far end just jacks up the noise, too, and they're lost. That's why DSL will only go so far (without a repeater/regenerator).
Telephone wiring was designed for audio of only a few kilohertz, distances of a medium-sized town (rural wiring is a special case), and MANY wires in a bundle. So it uses very thin copper. Central offices were spaced in urban areas so that everybody they feed would be close enough to get a good audio signal. But DSL uses higher frequencies which peter out closer to the source.
Within the distances and frequencies where a copper structure will act as a transmission line rather than being ruined by this effect you're still talking about 70% of c.
But when the poster said "propagate through copper" he MIGHT have been talking about the "skin effect". Eddy currents in the copper due to changes in magnetic fields produce a compensating field, and the result is the field doesn't enter the copper until the eddy currents die due to the copper's resistance. (That's why magnetic fields won't enter a superconductor - to a first approximation.)
But that confuses "propagating through copper" with "propagating along a copper transmission line". In a transmission line (or any other waveguide) the signal and energy don't propagate
through the conductor(s). They propagate through the SPACE BETWEEN the conductor(s). Raise the resistance of the conductors and you increase the speed of penetration of signals into the conductor, but slow its propagation along the line.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
actually 30Mbps is what 1 Tv channel (6MHZ) worth of bandwidth will get you. Take a modern 850MHz Cable plant and that gives you roughly 4.25Gbps of bandwidth possible over the cable coming into your house.
The trick there, though, is that they'd have to stop broadcasting TV on that system to get you the bandwidth, but the raw capacity is there, and that's per-node.
I'm not sure i had a point, just though i'd share the data... doesn't that make you feel better about your 1.5Mbit? *grin*
-- D-23994, Muff#2613
Considering that singlemode silica fiber is already flexible enough to wrap around a pencil continuously without breaking, I don't know how much more flexible it needs to be.
Maybe they're putting into layman's terms the new fiber's lessened susceptibility to attenuation due to bending. Modern fiber attenuates horribly if bent to less then (as a general rule) twenty times the outside diameter.
The upside of this is that if your signal is too high, a proper level is only a pen and some scotch tape away.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you say "fibre" out loud it sounds like Fib-ray or Fib-ree!! WOW! LOL! Fibree, like frisbee!
telstra would never allow this
Being a certified fiber optics technician I can tell you that fiber HAS ALWAYS BEEN MADE OF PLASTIC. It just wasn't as good as glass. Most of the plastic fibers were only useable in multi-mode cables as opposed to the less lossy single mode fibers that most of us think we are familiar with. But actually most of us have seen the cheapo plastic cable of home theater systems for the audio I/O. Cheap plastic is also what all your Star Trek Enterprise models have in them or those dorky bushy things they sell at Spencer's that light up and we stare at while we're high. All plastic. Unless you actually have a switch or router connected via fiber I doubt most people have worked with actual glass fiber cables.
Now the article was, of course, very short on detail so maybe they've made plastic fiber good enough for single model operation. I dunno. But fiber has been pretty cheap for the past couple years. That isn't the problem. It's the finishing($20/hr minimum labor) and the connectors($5-10 each-some more) that cost so much. Even the test equipment can set your back a good bit. Our electric company has a $30,000 OTDR test set and I don't even know how much their fusion splicer was (but since it came in it's own trailer I cringe at the thought). I suppose though that cheaper is always better so if you can get fiber for 2 cents a foot somebody will buy it. But until connectors, technicians, and test equipment costs come down, I don't see many businesses jumping on the bandwagon. Fiber network cards and routers, etc. are pretty darned high and unless you need just ass loads of bandwidth most company's settle for 100BT networks.
Hope this clears up a few things but to re-emphesize my point: Plastic fiber is not new news.
In other words, the cost of the optical transmission gear, the layer 2 line cards, and the switches and routers. As an example, for 10gig ethernet-over-fiber switches, the purchase cost per port is currently in the $400-$1000 range. And the annual maintenance costs are probably much more.
Being a fiber install I have to tell you you're dead wrong. I don't know much about Brewster's millions or whatever but glass fiber IS FRAGILE. When you stip it to put connectors on it that stuff snaps right off and gets stuck in your fingers. You have to re strip it 2 or 3 times sometimes before you get a connector on it.
And elastic...NO. If your try to pull fiber optic cable through conduits without using the included kevlar string (it's not there to make it bulletproof) you will stretch it out. Once stretched it is useless. If it were elastic then it would spring back to it's original diameter but it doesn't. You just wasted cable and man hours. Now having the plastic cladding does allow you to do some tighter curves but officially I think it's like 30 times the diameter of the cable is the smallest bend possible. We use pretty generous raduises for our cables and NOTHING angular. Trying to do a perfect 90 degree curve is asking for breakage. When handling it you can toss it around when it's spooled up and whatnot but don't do crap like step on it. You can crush it. Don't play tug of war with it. Stuff like that. Glass is fragile. Drop a glass on a tile floor and see how elastic it is. Oh and one more thing, you said:
"think of fiberglass"
Well I have thought of fiber glass and that stuff will snap on you in a heart beat. Even things like fishing poles and CB antennas that are supposed to bend will snap off if you try a tight bend. And how many of us have cracked bumpers and fenders on our crappy 80's camaros cause we leaned on them or dinged the curb. Certainly not bendy.
Your point on angles of incidence and whatnot might be valid but theary doesn't apply to actually using fiber. It is fragile. You can break it. And don't stretch it.
Nobody seems really care to find out what is this new material. Hope someone knowledgable can give us some insight with the following information.
t s_new. htm
c t.cfm?URI=OPEX -9-7-319
I did a Google search on Australian Photonics research. Got this URL:
http://www.photonics.crc.org.au/whts_new/wh
found this publication:
http://www.opticsexpress.org/abstra
It has a link to the full text. And here is the abstract:
Microstructured polymer optical fibre
Martijn van Eijkelenborg, Maryanne Large, Alexander Argyros, Joseph Zagari, Steven Manos, Nader A. Issa, Ian M. Bassett, Simon C. Fleming, Ross C. McPhedran, C. Martijn de Sterke, and Nicolae A. P. Nicorovici, Univ. of Sydney
Abstract
The first microstructured polymer optical fibre is described. Both experimental and theoretical evidence is presented to establish that the fibre is effectively single moded at optical wavelengths. Polymer-based microstructured optical fibres offer key advantages over both conventional polymer optical fibres and glass microstructured fibres. The low-cost manufacturability and the chemical flexibility of the polymers provide great potential for applications in data communication networks and for the development of a range of new polymer-based fibre-optic components.
Expense is a major misperception as the previous reply to this post points out. It's a hangover from the hippie era and mostly perpetuated by hippies-turned-engineers. Maybe not in 1967, but today, it costs more to put in marble countertops than to install fiber optic Ethernet To The Home (ETTH). Trenching costs are trivial. Local control freaks are not. They are completely obessed with their Right To Drive Cars Three Blocks to the store, and anything that might temporarily re-route that drive is dubbed Evil Corporate Destruction of their vital neighborhood streets. It's asphalt, for crying out loud! Well, they're my streets, too, and I vote: DIG THE HELL OUT OF THEM. The digging won't last forever, but the benefits will. That's the one best thing you can do to help speed Fiber To Your Door. Get in front of your local political bubble-heads and INSIST that they let companies bring the fiber to you.
... AS PLANNED, Mr. Wall St. But then, we're only low-life engineers, what would we know about actually building such things?
/. .
If we have anything to do with it -- and we do -- companies like OnFiber will soon figure out that by working with Fortune 500 Residential Developers, they can branch out to new revenue generating opportunities and begin the migration to a rightly architected Residential Information Infrastructure (RII), starting in new housing developments. As deployments increase in number, costs drop even further and it's a vituous circle that will save the world and bring peace to Jerusalem. Well, at least it will make companies like Always-On very happy, whose addressable market it limited only by sufficient, reliable bandwidth.
While it might seem like Gigabit ETTH is overkill, by the time you do the math for sending Everything over Ethernet for a family of four, the scenario changes quickly. You have to think in terms of sending different HDTV streams for each of three TV's in the home, while one of the kids is playing a fully immersive version of Diablo 6 with a peer-to-peer interface that looks like this. One Gbps may not be enough when you factor in all of the bandwidth load balancing and congestion considerations. What we have to get the -- how shall I put it delicately -- theiving f-ing MBA idiots on Sand Hill and Wall Street to understand is that overprovisioning bandwidth does NOT necessarily create an economic surplus. They certainly didn't seem to think SONET was economic surplus.
There is no bandwidth surplus anymore than there were honest auditors at Worldcom. In fact, it's very likely the peers of those auditors who manufactured the Too Much Bandwidth propaganda in the first place. What there is, is SUFFICIENT bandwidth to begin growing at the edges
There you have it, the mystical Economic Recovery for Dummies. It's called the Ethernet First Mile. Remember, you read it first on
I read somewhere the notion of making fiber out of hemp plastics. Not to mention just about anything else. ;)
Cheers, Joshua
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
I don't really want to argue w/ you, but should the streets be dug up every time there is a technology change? Look at how much the need(want) for bandwidth is growing. Should every time a new infinitly-massively-aggressive-large-obscure-playe r-male-dominated-fantasy-dungeon game result in the need for more BW? Arguement bad this one is a, true...
To the door, I think your going to have a huge problem with the last mile. Telcos are not going to put out the money needed with the current economic situation. Your looking at, at least 15-25 before they need to competativly switch. If there is a significant need for a traditional telco by that point. I think cable might make the higher end of your estimate if there is a drop in PC prices, or a rise in internet apps, but the cost for them to do last mile is also very high.
When I saw the subject I thought it was describing the state of teenage girls today.
Oh well, someone had to write it.
-- Make software not war
At least thats what they said in my telecoms course.
"Most Americans pronounce [Fiber] Farber."
I would really like to know where you get your statistics. Chances are you live in some mountains. Everyone there may throw in an extra letter in their words, but I can guarantee you that *most* Americans dont. I've been to New Jersey Michigan, Florida, and Washington State. I worked at a national computer helpdesk for almost 4 years. I've spoken to probably hundreds of people per state. *Most* people are satisfied with the number of letters in a word to begin with, and don't throw in an 'R' at any time.
That being said, I *do* know 2 people, one from indiana, and one from somewhere in the mideast, that pronounce 'Wash' as 'Worsh', and leave off 'To be' in their infinitive verbs, such as 'That dog needs worshed', but they are the gross, gross, almost statistically invisible minority.
As well they should be.
It's the changing electric field that carries the information. The field propagates at about 2/3 times the speed of light in copper. The motion of the electrons is because of the field, not the other way around as you describe.
The plastic fibers that are out there are going to made of PMMA and can only operate at temperatures of 85c. Admittedly, this does not limit the real world applications, but IMHO we can also infer that existing PMMA cable distorts/attenuates ? the signal over longer distances, thus making a 'purer' transmission of data viable over a greater distance. Remember that items such as TOSlink are quite short.