What is Fiber Optic internet?
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What is fibre optic internet?
What is fibre optic internet?
In recent years you've likely seen internet service providers advertise high speed fibre optic internet, or heard people mention in conversation that fibre optic is a much better and faster form of internet connection. But what actually is fibre optic?
Fibre optic or fibre refers to the type of cable used to send and receive data to and from the internet to your home. The most common method and the only method up until recently was to use a copper cable, most homes still use this. Data from the internet is split into packets of 1's and zero's before before being sent down the copper cable in the form of electrical signals, these electrical signals are then received by your modem and converted back into which is then sent onto your router and finally sent onto the device that requested it.
The way fibre optic differs from the common copper cable is the way the data is transported through the cable to your modem. As we've mentioned the copper cable uses electrical signals to move data through the cable, however fibre optic cables use light signals in very thin flexible glass fibres to transport data to your modem where its converted back into useable data again. This is an example of how a fibre optic cable works, the fibre is surrounded by cladding that reflects the light so it can bounce off the sides when the cable turns a corner, this stops the signal being lost as light can normally only travel in a straight line. The actual glass fibres themselves are only around 50 to 100 microns thick which is roughly the diameter as a human hair!
So now we understand what a fibre optic cable is, what are the advantages of using fibre over copper cable for internet connectivity?
One of the main reasons is speed. Light travels much faster than electrical signals, this means the data coming to you from the internet reaches you quicker with a fibre optic cable so you have a faster internet speed. Copper cable typically provides speeds of 30 - 100 mbps but this vary widely based on location and other variables. Fibre optic cables can easily provide speeds of more than 1gbps which is over 10 times faster than copper cable internet speeds on average. For context at 1 Gbps an entire HD film can be downloaded in under a minute. It is theoretically possible for fibre optic to transport data at speeds of over 10 gigabits per second but this requires further innovation on internet service providers infrastructure.
Signal interference is another reason fibre optic cables are superior to copper . Due to the cooper cables sending electrical signals its easy for them to experience electromagnetic interference from other copper cables running under the ground near to them. on the fibre cables this is impossible as the light inside the cable is the signal and the cladding stops the light escaping.
A final advantage of fibre cables is future proofing. Bandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer across a given path. As the need for bandwidth increases with the ever increasing amount of data people consume, fibre optic is the only choice to go with for future proofing. Copper cables are already pushed to their limit with the amount of data they can transport at a decent speed. Fibre optic will likely not hit its bandwidth ceiling for decades to come.
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#fibreoptic #fiberoptics #fastinternet
2 سال پیش
در تاریخ 1401/08/20 منتشر شده
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