What Is Fiber Optics?
Fiber-optic lines are strands of optically pure glass as thin as a human hair that transmit digital information across long distances. Optical fibers have had a key role in pioneering the phenomenal growth in world-wide communications that has occurred in the last 25 years, and are essential in enabling the proliferating use of the Internet.
Since around the year 2000, major communication companies have been making the switch to fiber optic technology. Verizon, AT&T and Qwest are spending billions of dollars digging trenches and laying fiber optic cable throughout the United States. These growing networks of fiber optics are what allow services like Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-Verse to provide high speed Internet access, fiber optic phone services and fiber optic television. The data transfer rate over fiber optic networks is much faster than DSL, and even faster than broadband cable in most areas.
How Long Has Fiber Optics Been Around?
As early as Roman times, glass has been drawn into fibers. However, it wasn't until the 1790s that the French Chappe brothers devised the first "optical telegraph." It was a system made up of a series of lights affixed upon towers where operators would relay a message from one tower to the next.
In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell patented an optical telephone system, which he named the Photophone. However, his previous invention, the telephone, was more useful and took physical shape. During the 1920s, John Logie Baird in England and Clarence W. Hansell in the United States patented the idea of employing ranges of hollow pipes or transparent rods to channel images for television or facsimile systems. In 1954, Dutch scientist Abraham Van Heel and British scientist Harold H. Hopkins separately published papers on imaging bundles. Bundles shielded the fiber reflection surface from external distortion and greatly diminished interference between fibers.
In the summer of 1970, Corning Glass researchers invented fiber-optic wire or "optical waveguide fibers", which were able to carry 65,000 times more data than copper wire, through which information conveyed by a pattern of light waves could be deciphered at a destination as far as a thousand miles away. By June of 1972, Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz invented multimode germanium-doped fiber with a loss of 4 dB per kilometer and much higher strength than titanium-doped fiber. In April 1977, General Telephone and Electronics screened and deployed the world's first live telephone traffic through a fiber-optic system flowing at 6 Mbps, in Long Beach, California. They were shortly followed by Bell in May 1977, with an optical telephone communication system established in downtown Chicago, overlaying a distance of 1.5 miles. Each optical-fiber pair packed the equivalent of 672 voice channels and was equal to a DS3 circuit.
The Use Of Fiber Optics In Modern Communications
Sprint was founded on the first nationwide, 100 percent digital, fiber-optic network in the mid-1980s. The initial all-optic fiber cable, TPC-5, that applies optical amplifiers was laid across the Pacific Ocean in 1996. The next year the Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) became the longest single-cable network in the world and furnished the base for the future generation of Internet applications.
Today, an assortment of industries including the medical, military, telecommunication, industrial, data storage, networking, and broadcast industries are able to employ and use fiber optic technology in a mixture of applications. Telecommunication applications are widespread, running from global networks to desktop computers. As the need for data bandwidth growths, many Internet Service Providers are making the move to fiber optic enhancements to provide their subscribers with the fastest possible speed.