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Plastic Fiber Could Make Optical Networking a DIY Project
An anonymous reader writes "A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person. The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home." A mere "few hundred metres" of 100mbps (since plastic is thus far dimmer than glass) would suffice to wire any home I'm likely to occupy.
Put bluntly, price. And I think it would be easy to extend it to gigabit at some point, with higher-grade plastics.
Copper is much more expensive than plastic, and 8-wire CAT5 cabling is a lot harder to run than a plastic filament, to boot.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
Plastic fibre slashes optical network costs
Wed, 01/09/2008 - 19:49 - Wire Services
A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person.
The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home.
The project partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the 'edge' network.
"We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology," Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the project, said. "If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole."
Plastic fibres use harmless green or red light that is easily visible to the eye, as opposed to glass fibres which use infrared laser light that could potentially cause eye damage.
"I have a two-year-old child," says Nocivelli, "and I would never install a glass optical fibre in my own home, even though I have been working with glass optical fibers for many years."
Plastic fibres are also much thicker than glass fibres, a millimetre or more, and can be handled without special tools or techniques.
"You don't need to be trained to handle and install it. You just cut it with scissors, plug it in and it works. It's as easy as that," Nocivelli adds.
On the downside, plastic fibres absorb light more than glass, which limits their useful length to a few hundred metres.
They also have a lower data capacity than glass fibres, but that is not an issue for the cable that runs from a conventional glass fibre in the street into a house, or even for laying a network within a block of flats.
The partners have built a system that uses green light to transmit 100 megabits a second over a distance of 300 metres, which is the speed telecom companies hope to offer their customers five to ten years from now, and 50 times as fast as a typical adsl broadband connection.
Their second achievement is to transmit ten times faster still - one gigabit per second - over a 30m fibre, using red light.
By the end of the project in June 2008, they expect to have extended that to 100m.
"Then, of course, we will try to focus on longer distances," says Nocivelli. "We have already demonstrated that plastic fibre would be future-proof not only for the next ten years but for the next 30 years. With that speed in your home you could download a full DVD in thirty seconds."
The POF-ALL members have not had to develop any novel technologies, as they have built their systems using the latest off-the-shelf components and the ingenuity and skill of the ten academic and industrial partners.
Two products are already coming to the market. Luceat is commercialising an optical Ethernet switch (a router) using plastic fiber technology and the Fraunhofer Institute is looking for partners to market an integrated optical transceiver to work at one gigabit a second with plastic fiber.
Home and office networks could be rewired with plastic optical fibre so simply and cheaply it could be a do-it-yourself job.
"It's future-proof," confirms Nocivelli. You run at 100 Mbit/s today, 1 Gbit/s tomorrow and maybe 10 Gbit/s in the future."
A follow-up project, POF-PLUS, is intended to further develop optoelectronic components for plastic fiber and is awaiting a final decision on EU funding.
I work for a big telco, the one that runs fiber to the home, we don't put ends on the fiber, at least not directly. what we do is use a fusion splicer, and use a connector with a length of fiber already attached, we then splice that to the end of the fiber..
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
The big problem impacting speed is dispersion. The light takes different paths down the cable with the net result that some of it travels more slowly than the rest. At the other end, its as if you received a blurry picture: you can't tell what the signal was supposed to be.
If that doesn't make sense, let me explain it this way: light doesn't travel straight down a fiber optic cable. Instead, it bounces back and forth down the cable, first hitting the cladding at one side and then hitting the cladding at the other. That's why the light can go around curves; its not traveling straight, its bouncing back and forth off the walls. The index of refraction for the cladding material is much higher than the index of refraction for the fiber, so the light obeys a principle called "total internal reflection" instead of the cladding absorbing it.
Some photons go pretty straight, rarely hitting the walls. Others bounce off the walls a lot. That changes distance they travel, which changes the time it takes them to reach the other end. With a thick plastic cable, the ones that bounce a lot will travel a much longer distance thus you have to space the changes in the signal further apart for them to be detectable at the other end of the cable.
Make more sense now?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
You mean like the 5 year spot chart here? 400% increase in just a couple of years? It is doing just that, and that is before the real demand goes up; electrical motors for Cars as well as copper wiring going into chinese homes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Also, we've got quite a bit of recyclable plastic sitting in landfills. More than we could ever possibly need. Likewise, there are a few new "plastic" materials on the horizon that can economically be produced from plants.
Plastic was made out of plants, hemp was a good feed stock, before oil was used to make it. Which is part of the reason hemp was made illegal. In the mid 1930s, before the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 basically made hemp illegal, DuPont was granted patents on making plastic from oil.
FalconShould there be a Law?