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Fiber Optic vs Copper
pcnetworx1 writes "Recently companies, such as Verizon with their FIOS service, have begun to migrate from legacy copper to fiber optics. Corning (admittedly one of the largest fiber optic cable makers) is running an article which explains why it is actually cheaper to go for the fiber optics."
laying fiber is 10x more expensive than copper.
But fiber carries hundreds to thousands more channels of data than copper.
that's why it's cheaper.
they basically said that for extremely high bandwidth or long range applications, fiber is the way to go. this is news? i've known this since I started networking (late '90s) and it was common knowledge well before then.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Fiber is a step above copper with respect to infrastructure security. While this doesn't have implications for everyone plenty of businesses and government agencies require that level of security.
Carry on downloading during that thunder and lightning!
Higher speeds, longer distances... And never forget the bragging rights of... "I am on fiber."
~oid
Whoah dang, it took them a while. Now will we actually have upload speeds to match our download speeds? :(
brDidn't think so
My aunt used to work for this israeli company called actelis who was pioneering an algorithm that would allow fiber speeds to be achieved over existing copper. It was somehow, with a piece of hardware about the size of a microwave, able to reduce the number of errored packets transmitted, improving the efficiency. On the other hand I've also read about a technology called DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing [protocol]) which allows each wavelength of light (aka each color) to be it's own data channel on the same fiber line. With this protocol they estimate a single fiber optic wire could transmit 2 GB of data per second. Not sure why it hasn't been widely accepted yet.
-very- strange stuff starts happening, when lasers on either end start to flake out.
I use special oxide free copper wiring and power cords to eliminate excessive "power banding" that produce a grittiness to the intenet.
That's why I'm sticking with copper.
..........FULL STOP.
Back in the day of 56k modems, you could only get 56 if you dialed into an isp that supported it somehow, and even then, only get that speed incoming. Connecting to your friend's 56k modem would yield only 33.6 in each direction IIRC. What kind of device was needed and how did it work to support 56k connections, and how much did they cost?
It's not really that different. If somebody wants to wiretap your home's or business's Internet connection by climbing telephone poles or popping manhole covers, the fact that the connection is fiber just means they need to bring some splicing hardware instead of copper alligator clips, and have a co-conspirator / getaway-driver with you to explain why your fake phone company truck is working at Midnight ("because that way it won't interfere with our customer's business", which is true for real repair people as well as wiretappers.) It's a bit more of a skilled job, but it's not the easiest place to attack most businesses anyway. More typically, you're an insider, but if you're an outsider, you want to crack into the victim's firewall over the Internet, or email them trojan horses, or if you *must* do hardware, you want to get into their phone closet where they've got the yellow sticky with the router password. But it's probably an inside job.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Cable? I boycotted recorded sound long ago. Now I strictly attend live performances.
really 867993
Karma schkarma
I've wondered why nobody's developed a fiber standard for things like connecting external disk drives to personal computers? Wouldn't it be great to just snip an unjacketed monofilament line to length, and stick it into a grab-and-hold fitting? I'd love to see cheap plastic fiber replace cat-5 cabling for any runs from 1 to 100 meters.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It doesnt take a genius to think that who actually needs optics? As said earlier in the article t will cost about 10X as much to wire optics insted of copper. The company i worked for did CAT6 points for about £35 each. When you want fiberoptics and it going to flood wire a building the cost will be totally unjustifyable. Why spend £350 per point when you can spend £35 and have the job done just as well just not as fast and for 99/100 businesses this will be more that fast enough to spread around that email that says there is cake in the kitchen.
I tried fixing a broken fibre, but the solder wouldn't stick!
Nope I thought not. Fibre-attach is the standard way that people connect from a server to a SAN, its very expensive at the moment and its much easier to use things like USB 2.0 or Firewire 2.0 as they have much lower production costs.
So its already invented but you probably can't afford it.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I will be thuroughly impressed if fiber can be brought from the pole into the home. A analog/digital converter would allow uses to keep using existing phones on an all fiber phone network, but a whole range of new products could be used for digital Internet access. DSL doesn't work via fiber optics, so an all fiber phone system could usher in a whole new type of Internet service via the telecoms and at speeds that exceed what DSL can offer right now. Regular modems would still work but much more efficiently than before since fiber isn't volunerable to EM interference like lightning from thunderstorms, high-tension powerlines, peak cellphone usage (yes this does effect copper landlines), raido signals (try going online via an unfiltered phone line if you live near an airport), and sun spots.
Fiber lines are harder to illegal tap. There is a device that can connect to a standard copper pbone cable without piercing the outer insulation. By turning a set of dials you can listen in on all of the phone conversations going on through that cable. Such a device wouldn't work on a fiber line because it exploits certain laws governing electromagentism and how electricity travels through wires. In order to illegally tap a fiber line you'd have to cut it, that would disrupt service for a while, and its would instantly be noticable.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
I am currenly on 100Mbps up/down fiber for just about US$50 per month (split among two other roommates equals less than $20/person) just outside of Tokyo. Lots of people say "The US is so broad that we can't do this!", but I fail to see why this kind of connection isn't available in US cities. I am outside of the most dense parts of Tokyo (in fact, I am in a suburb of Kawasaki), but that didn't stop the ISPs (So-Net in my case) from running fibre to apartments.
Come on, USA! At least in the cities, there is no reason to be so far behind with regards to residential access!
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
As the repost properly would say. Copper can be sufficient enough, but what starts happening when in future the speeds and demands of the copper start increasing? It needs to be replaced, which means installation all over again.
With fibre, in same scenario as above, not much will change, so the same cable can be used for higher speeds.
We support 802.11 wireless (it sucks, The technology isn't reliable and most people don't understand how to use it!), Cable modems, Dialup, fixed point wireless (this sucks worse, slow and almost unusable), and now "Fiber to the home" of all of them the fiber seems to be the best. We are even considering replacing some cable lines with fiber in existing builds where we have had problems with the cable or we have higher bandwidth demands.
I know the cost is more but maintenance is much lower and that is what kills you in the long run, going out and splicing a rodent chew. Fiber just doesn't have the same problems.
Just my opinion, but I use it now, in the real world and it isn't speculation at this point.
/ None of them. Chromed steel all the \ /
\ way!
\ ____
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\ O| |O|
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cpu0: Microsoft Clippium ("GenuineClippy" ChromedMetal-Class). Paperbinding, lockpicking, fish-hook-hack support.
A smart intruder may want to do some remote work on the routers or the computers of telephone companies.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Perhaps the big players should try and coincide a wide spread roll out of fibre with a general aboption of IPv6. That way we could get all the pain and expense over and done with in one hit. Mmmmmmh huge untypeable IP addresses - just what I've always wanted.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
If you put in 62/125 micron fiber in 1985, you'd still be using it.
But if you installed Cat3, then you yanked it and went to TSB Cat 5. Now they're goading us into Cat 6, and extended variants.
It's true that 20 years ago, one used bizarre jigs to terminate fiber, but those days are long gone. Optical TDR test equipment had dropped like a rock, and you can get unbelievably cool handheld and laptop-based diagnostic equipment these days for fiber.
And the cost to do fiber has dropped amazingly, too.
Fiber has always had a cutting edge-like price tag because the equipment was usually the fastest, like the first gigabit Ethernet, fiber channel SANs, and so on. But there's practical reason: you simply can jam far more data into a fiber pipe than a copper one, and this'll always be the case. The real limits of fiber simply have not been found yet, what with DWDM, multiple lambdas, and so on.
And no, I don't work for Corning. I'm an engineer that's designed a lot of MANs and WANs.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You also forgot that because of the EM field generated by copper it's signal can be read from several feet away, where as fiber doesn't have this problem. The exact distance depends on several variables including, but not limited to the following, What kind of network is going through the copper, how many pairs in the bundle, weather it is shielded or not, etc...
So this means it is easier to detect a wiretap on a fiber network then on a copper one, because you have to splice the fiber, where as you can just park your device a few feet away & still get the signal with copper.
Because when I had fiber installed in my apartment a few months ago, the guy had no problem with taping it against the wall/floor junction (radius of curvature... (goes and measures) 3cm), and I still get close to 100Mbps. Perhaps not quite as good as copper, but not that much worse, either.
I'd love to have fiber drops to the rooms of my house. It was'nt the cost of the fiber which was prohibitive. It was the cost of the Fiber SWITCH!
As for campaigns, things seem to have calmed down a bit, though it wasn't that long ago that TEPCO was offering an initial free 3 (or was it 6?) months if you installed their "hikari-fibre" service. Pay attention to the ISPs campaigning in many stations and you can probably find a good deal. :D
Basically, that is the best idea. Recently (i.e. in the past year or year and a half), a lot of companies were pushing fibre optic connections and/or really fast ADSL connections, including some with deals like free installation and a free first #months for a certain contract (my ass says something like 2 years). Hell, not more than a year ago, YahooBB was giving away free WiFi capable routers with their ADSL service on top of the couple of months for free.
Of course, I believe that for things like high speed ADSL, it depends on your location. Shop around and see what you can find. Good luck. :D
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
here are the problems! 1. Monopoly CONTROL! Verizon isn't just trying to give you high speed Internet, they're trying completely take over your phone. Once your phone is on fibre, you can no longer switch local service providers (unless they allow that for some reason). The reason is that the fibre line is completely theirs and the old copper was financed by govt regulated monopoly. This is a return to the old Bell only days! 2. They do everything possible to cut off copper service to your house even if you tell them not to so as to make it nearly impossible to get a phone line from someone else! (Took me over a month!) 3. Why else would you want a copper phone? POWER OUTAGES! Copper phones usually have their own power and continue to work when the main power goes out. Fibre phones installations come with a battery pack that you have to maintain. They saw the phone can get 4 hours of talk time. Not so good if you run a company or home business on that line. Plus, the only thing that worked during 9/11 was the copper phone line (yes sometimes the lines were busy, but it still mostly worked as cell phones didn't). Internet was pretty slow at that point too. If having a working phone isn't important to you, you could always go with Vonage or whatever, but that's still relying on a single communications channel not to fail in a major emergency. 4. Verizon's customer service sucks. THey know they have you by the balls and once you have fibre, there is no going back! That said, the internet service is pretty sweet. I've been running it since September and not a single burb since then. The 1.5 Mbs upstream speed is really nice too. So my advice is switch your local phone service to someone else and then get Verizon to do your Internet. That way they have to leave your copper phone lines in place. However, they just bought out MCI and the other local phone guys are pretty sucky so beware! Verizon is the next M$ watch out!
FireWire have fiber optic connectios (glass and plastic fibre) specified for 800-3200 Kbps up to several kilometers. We use it in house for backup purposes, and I know of TV-stations that uses it for live connection of DV-cameras straight to the editing studio some distance away.
The problem with this it the same as with all optic links, the cable is rigid and can't be turned nearly as tight as copper cables. It isn't that practical for the applications you mention.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Even with mine, I almost never get much faster than 1~2Mbps on individual fast connections (e.g. downloading from servers in Japan, using BitTorrent, etc), but I have definitely had more than 10 connections each downloading at about 1Mbps simultaneously...
This kind of makes sense for me because of the factors involved: 1.) I use AirPort Extreme, so really, my computer (and one of my roommates on the same type of computer) am limited to a theoretical max. of 54Mbps; 2.) my other roommate is directly connected to the router using 100Mbps ethernet; and 3.) lots of places on the internet are just not able to handle connections that fast and/or have lots of simulatenous users so have to divide their bandwidth (I think...does that make sense?).
Anyway, the point is, even with all three of us using the connection simultaneously, I highly doubt we ever max. out the connection. On the plus side, for the most part regardless of how much bandwidth any of us is using (which is almost always less than the theoretical max), we never individually experience slow-downs in our connection from our own personal little side of the internet (well, except when my other PowerBook using roommate is streaming music to the AirPort Express to his stereo).
Nice, eh?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I've hear about weird stuff happening with fibers. Something like it during some malfunction burning at intervals along its length, and then somehow repairing itself. - What's that about?
All rites reversed 2010
Ive never had any of the "breakage" issues associated with fiber when using fiber audiocables in my home theater, and I think that lacking home optical internet connections is a hinderance to commerce, just think about all the money that can be made off the sale of services on the internets once 100+mbps fiber connections are the norm for the average consumer.
As long as I'm livin' here in hurricane land I'm stayin' with 48 VDC current loop BUG* wire.
*Buried Under Ground
On a just barely related note, Sprint is coming under fire from the union for their plans to spin off their land line business (the old Carolina Tel. & Tel.) and leave it saddled with their debts while they specialize in being a wireless company. I think that would be great. The sooner the company that owns the last mile and the central office buildings goes bankrupt, the sooner local municipalities can buy them up cheap and either offer local phone and DSL cheap or give low cost access to any companies that want to compete with each other to offer local phone and internet.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It's a marketing piece. As such nothing in there is actually false, just a little rose coloured.
The article says the same cable is used, but it glosses over the terminaors. I've gone through ST & SC, and now LC. Every couple of years they change the connector and then you stuck with frankefibres (patch cable with the new connector type on the patch, and the old on the machine.) It costs big bucks to replace your connectors. I hope they plan to stay with LC for a while, because replacing the connectors is nearly as expensive as replacing all the wiring.
We have an office building. The copper used to go down several floors
to a central patch. We figured we'd modernise by having the copper terminate at switches on each floor, and run fibre down. Great except the fibre downlinks blow like popcorn. We were replacing cisco gbics every other week, and they're not cheap.
For long haul, I'm sure it makes a lot more sense, but in terms of building infrastructure, it would not have saved anybody much in the
past 10 years if they had stayed with copper. And the end point electronics are still way more expensive.
Where fibre was a big win was with HIPPI. We had copper HIPPI and those
cables were about an inch thick with 100 or so pin connectors. The fibre was just plain ST terminated multi-mode. Much easier to run.
If the phone companies start rolling it out in a big way, maybe the
price for end point equipment will come down.
note to self - remove the yellow sticky next to the router in the wiring closet.
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
Copper cant be used for new communication, Fiber Optics can, see below,
http://colossalstorage.net/home_entangled.htm
please allow me to pull some numbers out of my ass...
20 years ago, 9600baud was "good enough for now". 15 years ago, 14.4kbps was "good enough for now". 10 years ago, 33.6kbps (or was it 56kbps at that time?) was "good enough for now." (well, for some people...those of us on T1s or greater to university networks would beg to differ). 5 years ago, 1.4Mbps cable was "good enough for now (speaking from my own experience)...
Now? Some companies, like Apple are allowing downloading of TV programs. Some day that may become movies, or as someone else mentioned "IPTV". I imagine that somewhere around that time, 100Mbps Fibre will be "good enough for now", but will eventually be surpassed. Someday we will see something like "1Gbps? Good enough for now..."..."1Tbps? Good enough for now..."
I would not be surprised if those came in my lifetime...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I just learned about this in Physical Optics.
A fiber can be tapped by splicing another fiber parallel to it. Since fibers work on total internal reflection, there are evanescent waves outside of the fibers. Placing the second fiber within the evanescent wave frustrates the total internal reflection. You now have the signal in your fiber too.
This could only be done by an experienced professional, not just any old bum with a pair of alligator clips.
In addition, during the lifetime, fiber requires less power, and due to fewer amps it has fewer points of failure. Of course, a break in the line is more expensive.
So 10x? I don't think so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I get my porn live, screw this digital stuff.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have to wonder why it's more expensive to lay down fiber when you're basically doing the same things: Dig a trench, lay fiber down, add terminators, connect, cover back up. It's almost the exact same thing as laying copper. Why is it more expensive?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You need to use more flux!
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
You'd be surprised how involved dealing with fiber is. The thing about fiber is there's no way to easily tap a line without interrupting service for more than a few minutes. You basically have to cut the line, pull the PVC jacket and buffer (typically Kevlar strands) back, and strip enough of the cladding off to expose the core itself. Then you'd have to polish the ends, and put them in a butt-splice using something that will split off enough light for you to be able to at least listen in on any communication. I challenge even the best fiber techs to do all that and get the link back up w/o massive attenuation at the splice before somebody notices. Even then, (if you're talking medium to large companies) that's going to leave a mark in the logs.
:-P
Is fiber a replacement for good security practices? Not so much. But does it provide much better Layer-1 security than copper? Absolutely.
Then again, you're right that it would just make more sense to get in by software rather than a physical tap.
This sig rocks the casbah.
the big Canadian telcos have been replacing all their copper with fiber for years now. I know for a fact you'd have a damn difficult time finding copper between towns in British Columbia -- even the dead-end podunk town 100km to the east of my home, population 400, has fiber to its switch. And if what I've heard is correct, all new developments this past five to ten years have been laid with fiber to the local switch, and possibly dark fiber to the home in addition to the copper pairs.
I a little startled to hear that fiber is a big deal in the USA. Talk about behind the times!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Quantum cryptography, originally proposed and demonstrated by Charles Bennett at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, provides a way to communicate with complete security over an insecure channel such as an unguarded optical fiber. The security is guaranteed by the fundamental quantum properties of light rather than by computational complexity or physical barriers to interception.
I think you meant to write, NTT ran the fiber. NTT, the heavily government subsidized telco that controls nearly all the lines in Japan.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to tap a fiber without interrupting service. You still need to strip the jacket and buffer, but once the core is exposed simply bending it will cause enough leakage to detect the data flow with an optical pickup placed against the core. There are commercial clip-on taps. You will introduce some attenuation, but most fiber equipment won't notice any attenutation unless the receive power gets too low. It would take a OTDR to find such a tap. http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-federal-0 3/bh-fed-03-gross-up.pdf
Still much harder than copper, but not impossible.
Well, there is no reason in principle you can't cut through all the jacketing and get to the bare fiber without cutting it, then sand away some of the cladding until you can use evanescent wave coupling to pick off 10% of the signal, which will hardly be noticed (10% ~1 dB loss).
Alternately, you can just go to where there is already a splice, such as an amplifying station.
This is harder than attaching a tap to a copper line, but only because people haven't really tried. I am sure that the NSA and friends can do this just fine, and if it becomes profitable for others they will develop the tools to do what I have described or something equivelent quickly and efficiently.
You will get 56kbs in NO MORE THAN ONE DIRECTION. That will be from the digital end, to the analog end. This is because the digitally connected equipment can "sync" to the exchange, and time its signals in such a way it can send them more reliably, the only way 56kbs could be achieved with 8kHz TDM. You and your friend with "good phone lines" might have got more than 33k6 through due to compression, but you didn't get carrier speeds greater than 33k6 bps.
Also, with larger companies that use fiber, it's fairly typical to configure it in a ring for reliability, with the signal transmitted on both sides of the ring so it can switch over rapidly if one side fails, so the victim either won't see a failure unless they're monitoring fiber-level alarms carefully, or else they'll see a ~50ms hit on the end-to-end connection even if you took their circuit down for an hour. That's if they're using Unidirectional Path-Switched Rings, which are the most common configuration for local access; long-haul rings between telco POPs are more likely to be Bidirectional Line-Switched Rings, which have a more complex switchover configuration (similar to FDDI), and also have the problem that each data channel is only on one half of the circuit except during a failure - but BLSR's pretty rare in local access rings, and if you want to wiretap between telco offices you get yourself a wiretap warrant, and if you want to do _that_ illegally, do it by forging paperwork or lying to a judge, not by climbing around some manhole with a splicer.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There are so many things wrong with the article, it's hard to know where to start!
I presume from the article they would have me do all optical everywhere (since they are talking about wall outlets.
I can see reasonable applications for core fiber terminating in a switch, but fiber to the desktop is right out. First, I can't think of anyone who has even considered running 10Gig ether on desktop machines. Inexpensive (and perfectly adequate) Gig E is built in many MBs these days and the way cables get treated by most employees, a fiber cable would have an average life of 3 hours. Then there's the fact that most offices run just fine at 100Mbps.
They ACTUALLY bothered to mention temperature problems with copper? Never had that problem. If it's 40C, there are larger problems for the vast majority.
How many office complexes do you know where each wall outlet is cabled directly to a central patch panel? In most cases, 100m is way more than is needed to get to the correct switch.
Outside of core connections, nobody is using 10GigE for anything at all.
As for their argument about recabling, get real. At least the connectors on ethernet aren't flavor of the month. It's been rj45 for a LONG time. For fiber, I get to deal with several 'standards' to this day. Most offices did NOT rip their in wall cabling out and replace several times as they suggest, they just gave it a try and hey! it worked. I've seen plenty of offices that double up cat5 into 2 FastE connections (yes, it violates spec, yes, it works fine in real life).
As for the certification problems, many people just hook up a dirt cheap tester and green light means go. The rest (but for a few anal ones) just plug in the hardware and see if they can ping.
Moving on to cost, they MUST tell me where they shop! I see a bazillion inexpensive Fast and Gig E switches and cards everywhere, the fiber equivilants are inevitably more expensive.
I have never seen a network problem tracable to someone untwisting too far when punching cat5 down.
Given the success rate of wardrivers, I'd guess switching from cat5 to fiber for security reasons will noy help much.
You don't need to do any splicing at all to tap a fiber, you just need to bend a fiber beyond its critical radius and it starts leaking light. Put the right kind of lense at the right point and blammo, you've tapped the fiber with no service interruption. I work for a security company and we do this exact demo at trade shows using a video signal. It's funny how many jaws hit the floor. The tap coupler we use was taken off a broken fusion splicer bought off ebay... so this stuff is available.
We do it with a bare fiber, but the orange or yellow jacket you typically see on fiber is not especially opaque. Get your receiver sensitive enough and you don't even need to strip the jacket off.
They can do it cheaper? Maybe now they'll explain why it costs so exponentially much more when we go up in speed on the network once we're there. Given the capacity for Fiber to support so much more, and given the reality of a basic rule on the net... You're really only as fast as your "slowest" connection.
From their site on Fios:
>Up to 5 Mbps/2 Mbps $34.95 - $39.95
>Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps $44.95 - $49.95
>Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps $179.95 - $199.95
Why? This costs just as much as DSL when the real world interferes. Doesn't it? I could be wrong about this, but frankly I'm wondering if it's really worth the price per megabyte.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
You must be some kind of superduper expert genius-type of guy. Those of us who have only been doing the same kind of thing since [i]the '70s[/i] are so glad you're here to show us the way. Kudos.