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Flexible Optic Fiber Promises Cheaper Last Mile
bn0p writes "Ars Technica has an article on a Korean company that has developed a low-cost, flexible, plastic optical fiber that could bring cheaper 2.5 Gbps connections to homes and apartments. While not as fast as glass fiber, it is significantly faster than copper. In related news, Corning recently announced a flexible glass fiber that can be bent repeatedly without losing signal strength. The Corning fiber incorporates nanostructures in the cladding of the fiber that act as 'light guardrails' to keep the light in the fiber. The glass fiber could be as much as four times faster than plastic fiber. Neither fiber is available commercially yet, but both should help with the last mile problem when they are deployed."
If you don't have other reasons to dig trenches etc, then wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Flexible fiber optic may be a great solution for our broadband needs, but their true calling is now twenty years passed.
The plastic one would be great in the last 100 feet (33 meters). It would be nice to run fiber through the home, as well as a cat 5. The cat 5 can carry power (POE). But if that plastic can carry 2.5G AND is easy AND cheap to install, it will quickly make waves in the housing industry.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not in the United States anyway, our "last mile problem" has a lot more to do with entrenched telecom and cable companies with regional monopolies than any sort of fiber bendiness.
Flexible fiber optics would do wonders for apartment buildings and its residents. With cable going digital in 2009, this would be very important. BTW - check out the back of your plates - it may be made by Corning as well (mine is).
I don't think the cost of the actual cable will change the equation very much. I've been out of it for more than ten years, but even then you could get fiber for less than $1/foot - I assume it's even cheaper now. I have to believe most of the cost lies in planning, getting permits, and digging trenches.
cheaper than the one I have now? sweet!
What I don't get is why we seemingly refuse to invest for the long-term in the United States. Sure, some companies do, generally the smarter ones. But when it comes to public infrastructure, politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.
I know that technology evolves at a rapid rate, but if we invest more money now and use the same amount of energy* now (compared to doing investing less money and the same amount of energy), then we can use the energy that's left over from not having to double our efforts next year for other causes.
*energy here is refering to human capital.
:%s:work:/.:g
The research group is mentioned to be in "Korea Institute of Science and Technology", which is better known as KIST here in Korea, isn't a company. It is a government research agency.
My understanding is that the last mile problem is all to do with the cost of laying wire not the cost of the wire itself. Also, if everybody has gigabit connections the cable provider is going to have to invest in some very serious switching and upstream connections. In short fixing the last mile will probably only expose problems up stream.
I keep wondering about god playing dice and quantum entanglement. Currently, the labs are stuck at a few miles. But if they can up the range and speed would this not be a better solution. A cable of infinite length that is also secure that you can give to any ISP. ISP would be an open market and speeds would go up as costs went down. No need for cable/wireless so zero installation costs.
So is QE going to happen or is it just my poor grasp of the subject matter?
It's not the cable itself that's expensive, it's laying it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You mean I can get internet porn even faster with these plastic rope thingys? Sign me up!
What's wrong with copper? I'd freakin love even 100 MBPS at my house! That's like a minute and a half for a good quality DVD movie instead of hours. And copper can do gigabit so geeze. They just need more of it and better network switches and routers instead of cheaping out and giving crap service to everyone to save a buck
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
There's a reasonable chance wireless will eventually solve many of the last mile problems; I recently cancelled Millennium Cable in Seattle for ClearWire instead. Right now it isn't available everywhere and the service isn't particularly fast by fiber standards, as its 1.5 down /756 (I think) up. But if the technology improves faster than fiber can be rolled out we might not care by the time 2011 rolls around.
Using quantum interactions to transmit information also requires you to transmit a signal the old fashion way. This is essentially what prevents you from exceeding the speed of light. You would also need a way to distribute the entangled particles ( each pair can be used only once ). The advantage of quantum entanglement is completely down to its ability to transfer quantum states ( no set of classical information can completely describe a quantum mechanical system ) and it's security against eavesdropping and brute force attacks
Now, contrary to popular belief a man in the middle attack is still possible. That you are exchanging pairs of entangled particles rather than exchanging large integers doesn't matter. You still have to be careful about who you accept keys ( or particles ) from.
The article writers and poster have no idea what they are talking about. Unfortunately most of us fiber scientists & engineers got laid off during the tech crash.
Plastic fiber has been around for decades. It is cheap. The problem with plastic fiber is that your signal won't go as far as with a glass fiber. However, for "last-mile" use, you don't need to worry about signal loss since you aren't going very far. The big cost in "last-mile" is digging up the ground and putting in the cable/conduit/fiber. The cost of the fiber is negligible compared to getting right-of-way and the cost of labor.
The cost of the fiber is so low, that normally when you dig up the ground to put in fiber, you put in lots & lots of fiber (since it is so cheap), just in case you need it in the future. This is called dark fiber, and there are millions of miles of dark fiber all over North America (from the tech boom) that used to belong to dotcom upstarts & their venture capitalists.
And as for bending fiber, you can always bend fiber. When you make very thin glass or plastic fibers for optical purposes, they are flexible. Has everything been running in straight lines?! Idiots.
Now, there is minimum bend radius for fiber, and if you bend your fiber beyond that, then you start to get some loss. Normally this isn't a problem, and you can't bend the fiber that far anyway - fiber has a cladding & outer sheath (which varies depending on the application indoor/buried/underwater), which limits the amount of bend, preventing bend loss.
I think you're correct - cable itself isn't the greatest expense - even the custom ends on the cables are fairly cheap, though more expensive than with copper as they are a bit finicky. But the installation is the expensive part. Civil utilities are installed in new subdivisions by government contractors by the local city or county in most places, but television cable and phone lines? I'm not so sure who foots the bill for that infrastructure. This doesn't even mention that installing new fiber in already existing subdivisions of single family homes has got to be expen$ive for sure. Telco and cable monopolies have little incentive to upgrade existing infrastructure in the last mile until current infrastructure has inadequate bandwidth for content. They're already running into some bandwidth contention during peak hours, which is why they are increasingly using throttling techniques and traffic shaping (like the forged RTS packets my own provider, Comcast, has recently gained so much noteriety for). That has turned out to be problematic for public relations and will rapidly provide diminishing returns, but I don't expect cable providers and telcos to do much until they absolutely are forced to do so. Adding customers adds to monthly cashflow; redeploying infrastructure doesn't. I suggest an actuarial decision will drive the deployment: When paid HD content outgrows the existing pipe in the last mile, the providers will build the infrastructure they need to reap those new revenues. So I expect content, not Internet traffic, will be the driver for the deployment.