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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.
Carry on downloading during that thunder and lightning!
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.
Lucent / Livingston PortMaster, Cisco 5200, 5300, 3600 and a T1 line or an E1 line, dependig on country. These days you can do it on a 260 as well.
Essentially, one of the sides of the connection had to be digital, if you ran two analogue signals (Two modems) back to back, you got 36K, but they found out if that one of the sides of the connection was digital, and was essentially guaranteed to be error free, they could push the speed at which that side transmitted. Hence what the other side recieved at. Whether you actually got 56K was also extremely dependent on the quality of your line. I remember being about 200m away from the exchange on the copper run (I worked at an ISP, so we had a line run for testing) and still only getting 52K.
We used to tell customers it was just the theoretical maximum as nobody in the country at the time had a chance in hell of getting those speeds.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
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
I don't know if you can get away with less quality over short runs. Because it is an optical system I would expect that it will either work or not, there won't be much middle ground.
Most of my experience with fibre dates back about ten years when I was involved with a large, distributed CCTV system. The cable would enter the building via a large pit (about a metre across) and from there it would be cable tied to mesh cable guides all the way to the network terminating gear.
Where the cable had to negotiate a corner in a room (for example, wall to ceiling) it would follow a gentle curve from one cable guide to the next with a radius of curvature of about 200mm.
Fibre cabling around the 19 inch racks which held the equipment was done with a similar amount of care.
The funniest thing I saw was a contractor who used an auger to bore a hole straight down into one of our main inner city roads. The auger went straight into the pipe holding the fibre for a nearby traffic camera and 100 metres of cable wound itself around the auger bit exactly like pasta aound a fork.
Needless to day that length of cable was totally stuffed.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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!
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!
I don't know about other countries, but AARNET here in Australia recently upgraded their network with 10Gbps fibre connecting major metropolitan centres as well as Seattle and LA in the US. Slower copper links are used for redundancy and connecting not-so-major metropolitan centres. And it supports IPv6 as well as IPv4.
It's refreshing to see their attitude about IPv6 in their design goals:
Also, Australians can use their IPv6 migration broker to get a local IPv6 tunnel.
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.
It's called Fibre Channel; but it is mainly enterprise class. (And yes, the spelling I just gave is correct.) You can buy portions of it cheap on EBay (Optics for $10 - Search for "Optical SFP" or HBAs for $50 (Host Bus Adapter; PCI card with optical connections) -- search for "Fibre Channel HBA")... but then you need the drive enclosure (typically rack mount) and the drives themselves.
The optics themselves aren't the expensive part of this system, at least according to the EBay ecosystem.
Well, plastic fiber won't likely go 100m (too much attenuation) .. but glass optical fiber is fairy flexible -- a little more so than my mouse's cable -- but it is not kind to kinks, especially. There is a post later that indicated it's all or nothing wrt. bend radius -- not true. Increasing tightness will cause increasing attenuation, but true cut-off (no light passed) is difficult to attain, even when you are trying to do so.
Just my thoughts; not representing any particular company view, yadda, yadda...