Broadband, what we call high-speed internet access today, is now a necessity for everyone, not a luxury. In less than half a century, communications on a backbone of fiber optics has revolutionized society and how we speak to each other. Fiber optics makes broadband possible, and it connects continents, cities, buildings and the world. 

How did we get from an era when telecommunications meant making a telephone call or sending a telegram to today’s world, where every piece of information is available at the click of a mouse or touch on a screen, practically anywhere in the world? How did we get from a time when a phone was connected on copper wires to being able to connect with enormous bandwidth using fiber optics at home or on a wireless handheld device practically anywhere?

By the mid-1990s, the internet was a huge topic of conversation. “The information superhighway” had caught the public’s interest as it was commercialized, letting civilians use the same communications system created several decades before as ARPANET to connect the computers of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Updating the infrastructure

The problem was that the information superhighway was actually an old dirt road made for horse and buggy travel. People connected to aging copper phone lines with dial-up modems that operated at slow speeds, first at only 300 bits per second, then developing up to a maximum 56 kilobits per second. It was OK for email, but the new graphic interface of the World Wide Web was really slow.

Everything changed overnight. In February 1997 in a Boston suburb, a tech from Continental Cablevision, our cable television (CATV) company, came to my home office. He was a former network tech from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), skilled at installing computer networks for companies. In a few minutes, he attached a small device that looked like a cable box to my coaxial cable and the ethernet port on my computer, loaded some software onto my computer and logged me in.

At that moment, I became one of the first customers to have broadband—perhaps one of the first 25 and certainly one of the first 100. We tested my speed: 4 megabits per second for downloads and 1 megabit per second for uploads. It was always on and ready for use for $40 a month. Revolutionary!

But I was not surprised. We had run a technology committee for our kids’ school system for several years, with other members representing DEC and Continental Cablevision. We had email and web service available in the schools already. Our school system had CATV and a school video system over a coaxial network installed by Continental Cablevision as part of their cable franchise agreement with the city. Our small New England town had been one of the first to test these gadgets that used CATV infrastructure to provide computer network connections and internet service to schools.

The advent of cable modems

DEC had been experimenting with a gadget developed by Rouzbeh Yassini of Applitek, a networking company in the Route 128 tech corridor of Boston. Yassini was involved with broadband network technology using coaxial cable. That was when “broadband” had a different meaning than it does today. Broadband networks used frequency modulation over coaxial cable such as FM radio and CATV. Yassini realized that by using the frequency allocated to a TV channel, he could transmit digital signals over a CATV network. And thus the cable modem was born.

CATV companies were making another revolutionary change. The scientists at Bell Labs developed the new distributed feedback laser able to reproduce CATV signals optically. CATV companies began replacing their coaxial backbones with fiber optics in what they called a hybrid fiber-­coaxial (HFC) network. The HFC network had more bandwidth, was more reliable and enabled CATV networks to cover larger areas. 

The cable modem allowed CATV companies to dominate the internet provider market for decades. The telephone companies’ responses—integrated services digital networks and digital subscriber lines—were never able to compete with the cable modem in spite of going through at least 20 different standards. 

Telcos realized they needed fiber to the home to compete with the cable modems, after their digital systems over aging phone wires proved inadequate. The deciding factor was the 2004 Bernstein report from Telcordia showing the economic advantages of fiber to the home. Verizon was the first big telco to start converting to fiber to the home with their FiOS network around 2006. Now almost every telco is converting to fiber.

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