Electical Contractor

It’s obvious that fiber optics is not copper wiring. Advantages of fiber include the capability of going longer distances at higher speeds, plus immunity to electromagnetic radiation. These advantages overcame its cost disadvantage and made it the cabling choice for telecommunication and CATV.

The Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council today applauded the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) decision to deregulate FTTH networks owned by incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs).

By Rick Laezman Like many high tech products over the last few years, fiberoptic cable has experienced a roller coaster ride of extreme highs and lows. 2001 was a peak year for installations of single- and multi-mode fiberoptic.

Fiber optic cable has typically been categorized as fragile,like glass, which the actual fiber is, of course. But unlike drinking glasses that break when dropped or windows that lose every battle with a kid's baseball, glass optical fiber is incredibly strong and flexible.

The fiber optic cable you just installed failed testing. What do you do next? How do you find the problem and fix it—fast? Fortunately, fiber optics is easy to install and experienced installers generally find that about 95 percent of all fibers they install will test good.

When fiber was introduced,its enormous bandwidth and extremely low attenuation made it the No. 1 choice to replace copper in long-distance telephone networks. Once the telcos switched from multimode to single-mode fiber in 1984, they found almost boundless bandwidth.

Fiber optics is full of jargon but it’s important to understand it. One of the more confusing terms to many is “wavelength.” It sounds very scientific, but it is simply the term used to define what we think of as the color of light.

Well, we’ve heard it all before—fiber to the desktop (FTTD) is on its way to becoming the power source of choice. While unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cabling has been dominant, there is reason to think fiber will be a true competitor soon.

It may seem unbelievable, but fiber optic links and networks have been used for over 20 years. The first telco networks were installed in the late 1970s and data links were already in use by 1980, when there were few personal computers (PCs) and computer networks.