Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
Fibre cables can't have sharp bends in them because the photons would literally not make it around the bend if it is too tight.
Because of this the cable has to be carefully laid. You can't just string it anywhere.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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 tried fixing a broken fibre, but the solder wouldn't stick!
Fibre cables can't have sharp bends in them because the photons would literally not make it around the bend if it is too tight.
Because of this the cable has to be carefully laid. You can't just string it anywhere.
This is true for today's high-bandwidth glass fibers, but is it necessarily the case? I'm not talking about multi-kilometer signal paths.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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
Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing isn't so much a protocol as it is an improved method of encoding.
The main obstacle to adoption, as far as I'm aware, is the crosstalk incurred at the amplifiers.
Most fiber-optic connections these says make use of amplifying L.A.S.E.R.s wherein the incident EM photons induce the emission of photons of identical frequency from atoms which are in an energetic state. However, due to the finite power of the pumping source, and the finite population of the atoms used as lasing medium, there can be problems with crosstalk - Transmitting a high level on one frequency depletes the population of energised atoms in the lasing medium and causes the amplification ratio of the other frequencies to drop.
I read a while back about one type of L.A.S.E.R. amplifier where a single frequency was injected transversely to the path of the intended amplified radiation. This would make each frequency have a constant "big" competitor for the energised atoms, and thus drastically decrease the magnitude of this crosstalk.
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!
\ ____
\ / __ \
\ O| |O|
|| | |
|| | |
|| |
|___/
cpu0: Microsoft Clippium ("GenuineClippy" ChromedMetal-Class). Paperbinding, lockpicking, fish-hook-hack support.
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!
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.
note to self - remove the yellow sticky next to the router in the wiring closet.
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
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
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.
You need to use more flux!
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
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...
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.