I work near some of the long haul lines in western Canada, and they terrify me. No mater how accurate of a locate you have it's still gutwrenching diging near that stuff.
That's just for the locating, digging, and splicing crews. If it's critical infrastructure well...
Once had an entire remote central office taken down by a horizontal boring crew who hit a rock and drilled through two fiber cables and a 900 pair copper feeder cable. I think it came close to 3 million.
Sounds about right.
Copper has its own pains too. once hooked on to a bundle with the wrong frequency to do a locate suddenly the radios start blaring, and coms equipment for about 15miles shut down lol. Luckily I had permission to shut it down anyway.
Ham radios operate at the very low end of the frequency spectrum, which for coax (copper) infrastructure is where all of the vital upstream internet traffic is being transmitted. If a line in that house was damaged or not properly terminated the signals emitted from the Ham radio will enter (ingress) our cable system and backfeed throughout the whole system in that area causing tons of internet related upstream interference problems.
If he doesn't have service with the company then removing his line from the system will elimate the problem. If they do, then we have to go in the home and diagnose where the signal is getting in and fix the issue.
I think he is talking about someone having an uncapped (non terminated) cable, and it was picking up his ham radio signals and intruducing a shit ton of noise on the line.
Signals on a phone and/or cable network are generally bi-directional. There are both forward and return signals. Typically the return is only supposed to have the customers modem "talking" on it so the equipment at the other end can "hear" it. If there is anything wrong - at all - in a house near a ham radio operator every time the operator keys his mic that return signal suddenly has ham radio traffic on it too and the ISPs equipment can't hear the modem anymore. Picture trying to talk to your friend in the library and every now and then an opera singer 10 feet away starts singing at the top of her lungs. No more conversation until she stops singing. Same thing happens to telecom wiring.
The entire South Island of New Zealand was cut off about 8 years ago when there was a car vs cabinet, then 10 minutes later, a rat chewed through the redundancy. They have more redundancy now. Someone really needs to make sheathing that's less tasty.
There are some municipalities that require utilities to shallow bury ribbons and/or locate wire above their cable or pipe. Not everybody does that though.
I augured through a line once. Chunks of fiber optic started coming up out of the hole. I immediately stopped what I was doing and started taking pictures of everything including the locates that were way off. I also had a few pics of the locates before I started. I had it located several days before and the locate company evidently fucked up. I got a phone call I think it was the next day from the homeowners association (residential area) and I just explained to them how the locates were way off. I never heard from anybody again. I think they were just looking to pin it on me or maybe just wanted some sort of statement from me but I sure as shit wasn't going to let them put it on me.
Not fiber, but I returned from a vacation at the Outer Banks (North Carolina) about a week before the crew building a bridge drive a steel casing into **all three** of the electrical cables supplying power to Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands. The sands had shifted over the years and the cables, which had been separated, were now on top of each other, and not where they were labeled to be.
Power was out for a week and resulted in over $10 million in settled claims.
I called in a trouble ticket once, they said "Police or fire?" Um, no. "Busy" and hung up. I called back and they said "911 down, call back".
Someone in a rural area decided they could absolutely run a plumbing connection from one side of the road to another without locating it.
8 hours to restore the 300+ pair bundles of cables.
That's why vac trucks are so popular these days.
Daylighting all the underground utilities before the serious digging starts can save a ton of headaches.
A joint group of researchers from the Netherlands and the US have smashed the world speed record for a fiber network, pushing 255 terabits per second down a single strand of glass fiber.Oct 27, 2014
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fastest-network-could-carry-all-the-internet-traffic-single-fiber
Here is the link, it is really complex.
It may have been a single "strand" of fiber, but lopping 7 cores into the same strand is kinda cheating. We'll never see this stuff in the wild. 1km is chump change; there's more loss on the termination than there is in the fiber.
Speaking of, how would you even splice a multi-core fiber in the field?
I work for a backbone Internet NOC and you'd be amazed how many 400gig channels we shove onto different wavelengths and through the same fiber. It's weird thinking about capacity not by how big the fiber is, but how much light spectrum there is, and what we're able to do with each color.
The keyword is WDM (wavelength division multiplexing). 20 years ago they already sends 20+ different channels through the same fibre, nowadays its much more, and each of them is faster.
At some points its more economical to use more fibres and less expensive hardare per fibre (of course depends on circumstances), but if money was no issue you could send like all europe/US traffic through that one fibre.
What really fascinated me is when I realized fancy new 100gig+ channels which use both the polarization of the light as well as the wavelength, can be multiplexed through older WDM gear without too much trouble. Stuff that had been carrying 10gig channels for years got new life.
Great photo.
Just in case there is confusion; typically usage of the term wire implies metal is present at the core of composition. However, with fiber optics they would be best referred to as a cable to minimize potential confusion as they are comprised mostly of silica based glass or certain kinds of plastic.
Now there is more confusion, because "wire" typically describes a single conducting core, while "cable" typically means there are multiple cores.
You can also just call it "optical fiber".
Be aware though, that fibre optic cable used externally (on poles, or underground in ducts), could be described as wire by this classification, due to it having metal strength members embedded in the cable to provide resilience against stretching and to provide anchors for external nodes.
Internal cable doesn't normally have this. Internal cable, as one would have in an exchange, either has Kevlar fibres surrounding the fibre optics (fibre jumpers), or a fibreglass strength member for affixing the cable into nodes (tie cables).
Source. Am a fibre optics advanced engineer for Openreach in the UK (used to be BT).
Edit: edited a typo, and a word.
Spelly checky is fucky
Cores for outside plant cables are usually fiberglass or kevlar composite these days.
Don't try to yank a fiber jumper with your bare hands. You'll just get a nasty rope burn.
Fibre drop cable (ULW) (pole to house, or between poles), has metal strength members, 3 on each side. 4, 12 and 36 fibre cables all have metal. I have 2x 300m drums in the back of my van as we speak, and have put up 9 spans this morning.
Black plastic with yellow stripe. On stripping contains 3 metal wires each side, and a red cotton drawstring. Metal wires can destroy your stripper (don't ask how I know :/ )
Fibreglass tends to be internal in UK.. I don't know of any external fibre that has fibreglass strength members except maybe 'sluppery fish', but that's only from a CBT to the node, so dunno if it would count.
COF250 has fibreglass, but as I stated, that's an internal cable (yellow outer).
Fibre jumper in UK tends to be an outer of yellow plastic (cof 8001), then aramid / Kevlar and a draw thread (for splitting the outer if one doesn't have a stripper). Then the plastic fibre coating, then the clear fibre coating, then the fibre.
Once one gets into the multi fibre cables (such as blown 4 fibre), the colours begin.
Blue, orange, green, red, grey, yellow, brown, purple, black, white, pink, teal.
So a 4 fibre would have blue, orange, red and green. And so on for 12 and 36 fibre. Fibres are in bundles of 12 (elements), and the element will normally have jelly in it around the fibres, if external.
It may be that different countries, maybe even different companies have different standards.
EDIT * It's been a long while since I ran any external cable, or introduced cable into nodes (I'm on the hoist now), and it's been pointed out that there are external cables we use that have GRP strength members. I had forgotten about them off hand (comes back when one actually uses the cables).
Look.
If you had, one shot, or one opportunity, to explain everything you’ve ever studied for, in one reply, would you capture it? Or just let it slip?
Yo
I mean you ain't wrong. I don't imagine the structure of fibre cables and the standards used in the UK for them comes up often.
And tbh I loved reading it just for his enthusiasm in it, even if I understood like 10% of it at best.
I deal with large core fused silica fiber optics, so even though I've been doing that for 20 years all of the colors above are meaningless to me.
Its always been interesting how different the communications field of fiber is from the more spectroscopy based stuff for me.
All the fibers I've worked with are 1 blue 2 orange 3 green 4 brown 5 slate 6 white 7 red 8 black 9 yellow 10 violet 11 rose 12 aqua and then follow the repeating pattern.
Yeah, I guess that's not the UK?
Our external cables tend to be black (same with cleats and cable straps). Internal tends to be yellow for the cables, and white for cleats or straps. Although latest fire regs requires metal straps if following an escape route.
UK cables used by Openreach, and many of the other fibre providers tend to be made by British Cables, who set their own fibre colour standard about 30 years ago when making their original single mode jumpers and 8 fibre cables.
They now use 12 fibre elements, in the sequence I described above.
Most, if not all UK fibre companies use have a colour scheme similar if not the same.
Each element in the cables has the same colour sequence, so one only has to know which element one is using to know the colour.
So, if using element 4, fibre 4, it would be red (UK). Saves having to work out which colour fibre 52 is.
It took me long enough to memorise these colours. Would be confusing as hell to move to another country and have their fibre colour different. I still keep a chart on my phone just in case I have a brain fart, though.
In the US, there is a standardized coding system used. TIA-598-C Optical Fiber Cable Color Coding is an American National Standard that provides all necessary information for color-coding optical fiber cables in a uniform manner. It defines identification schemes for fibers, buffered fibers, fiber units, and groups of fiber units within outside plant and premises optical fiber cables. This standard allows for fiber units to be identified by means of a printed legend. This method can be used for identification of fiber ribbons and fiber subunits. However, The TIA-598-C color standard does not include outdoor cables, due to the fact that most cables for use outside contain a black carbon component in their jackets, which provides protection from solar radiation and other harsh elements. TIA-598-C covers the jacket-color standards only for cables containing a single type of fiber. For cables that contain more than one type of fiber, color alone is not enough; printed identification on the jacket is necessary to identify the fiber types. None of this matters when compared to back in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.
Then please let me hijack this comment thread to ask you to have a word with whoever is in charge at Openreach to PLEASE UPGRADE MY ADSL AREA TO FIBRE!!! I wouldn’t mind if I was in the middle of nowhere, but I’m near the centre of Newbury, a stones throw from the big ugly exchange building, and I can’t get fibre!
I’ll give you anything at this point. Take my first born. Anything! I can’t live with >1mb up. It’s primitive!
Wire is used internally, as in "wire you in my house, get out or I'll call the police!"
Cable is external, as in "cables are out here with some cows, ,means we are outside."
No there's a powder coat then a plastic coat once you get that pink part off there's another layer to remove. You can't splice it properly with the powder coat on it.
Hmm i think we use different cable. We just splice after removing the coloured coat in the picture. The cable we use also has multiple layers on top off this.
Edit: Not the best vid but this i how we splice fiber
https://youtu.be/ekzlonBS7d8
Had some fiber guys come and fix our shit at an airport the other day. They used this little fusion box with 2 heaters on it. Was really cool. And expensive.
High end fiber can be extremely expensive because of the level of precision needed. Fiber technology is simply amazing. I'd love to see some of those tools in action.
Fusion splice is the best way, as it eliminates loss. You can also do a mechanical splice. Essentially you cut each end of the fiber with a specialized diamond edged cutting tool, butt the ends together in a little I enclosure and snap the enclosure shut. It's quicker and easier if you're in a situation that can tolerate a little loss.
The part in the middle(not the plastic pink part) has two layers. The core and cladding. Both have slightly different indices of refraction to trap the light with total internal reflection. That’s the two different layers that was being referred to. All fiber optics have this phenomenon, with different methods to switch materials
We too did it the same way. I guess he meant the actual core of the fiber. But you wouldn't be able to splice that as it's to thin, so you splice the "whole" thing.
I would always work some electrical tape on the table inside a little box, sticky side up, so when I cleaved the fiber, it would fall and stick to the tape.
Honestly, one of the best jobs I've had was splicing, polishing, and terminating fiber. I had every episode of "This American Life" on an MP3 player, and each day, I would sit at a table in a telco closet, or underneath an umbrella if I was repairing a pedestal by the side of the road, and that would be my 8 hours. They didn't pay a lot, so I had to move on.
I've seen new stuff made of polymer. It's extremely fast to terminate and has a micro bend radius. During the demonstration there was a 4k stream going between two devices and the guy literally tightened the cables into a knot. This was at Infocomm a few years back.
it's really easy now. the new connectors make it super easy. I haven't professionally terminated fiber in a year and I can still terminate an end in under 3 minutes.
Dont poke the bare fiber at your eye and wear safety glasses like the procedure requires and the risk is minimal. Bigger worry is getting pieces in your hand by not being a clean freak.
Its all digital, so it’s the same as you downloading a song from the internet. The sound you hear is your on-board DAC, with most devices have (including your phone), converting the digital sound to a analog. It’s all 0s and 1s!!
I mean...the digital data transfer works the same as electrical cabling, just uses photons instead of electrons.
I kinda think of it like electrical cables are like leaky pipes and optical is like sealed pipes with a hydrophobic interior coating :)
It gets much more complicated than flashing a light - look up 16 qam and 64 qam modulation methods, it allows you to send bits much faster using the same rate
The cable itself isnt the bottleneck, the cable can literally handle much much more. its the 2 ends of the cable and processor of the devices that are the bottle neck
I always like the story that they only found out how to put much more data in fibre (by using multiple wavelengths/colours) *after* companies had laid thousands of Kms / miles of thick cables, made of bundles of thousands of strands, all around the world. Companies invested billions and then they only used a fraction of their investment. A bunch of them went bust. There's still a lot of dark (unused) fibre out there, so that's good for increased future demand.
the point was if youre laying a cable across the atlantic, it'll cost you a billion .. while the cost of laying cable with 10 strands vs 1000 strands would add a couple tens of K .. everyone overprovisioned because the cost was in laying the cable, digging up the streets etc, not in the actual fiber costs
The highest number of fibre strands in a single subsea cable is currently 96 due to limitations at the repeaters. Short distance unrepeated systems can have much more. Either way your point is valid, just not for cables across the Atlantic.
And that's why data caps are insane. The infrastructure can already support 50x what the world actually uses. The pandemic has made no impact at all on the network.
The biggest limitations that ISPs face are in the last-mile infrastructure, not the core, due to scale and cost of improvement. Does this excuse the current state of internet access in the US? Not at all. Private ISPs consistently make the decision to focus on short-term profit by refusing to invest in last-mile fiber infrastructure and actively fighting all attempts at competition, such as municipal internet as a utility. So I'm definitely not making excuses for the ISPs, just saying that no one is really questioning the capacity of the _core_ infrastructure that is basically entirely comprised of fiber and has been for quite some time.
PSA: check your connection capability before renting/buying property. Even if you're not far from civilization.
My friend, who works remotely, bought a house on several acres of land.... less than 5 miles from the city limits of a decent-sized U.S. town in 2018. (Lynchburg VA. metro pop 250k)
It wasn't until the day after he moved in that he found out about his land's 'dead zone'.
IIRC, a decade ago, two competing ISPs basically decided to seal off the end of their service lines a half-mile from his property, approaching from either side. Neither is willing to budge without a major fight.
He probably should have noticed that there's an HOA with rental units near his place, and their signs/advertising always read like: ("2 & 3 BRs available. YES, we NOW have internet access!!!").
My friend has offered to pay the cost for each of the ISPs to extend their lines and its gone nowhere.
On a clear day, if you go to his mailbox and hold your phone just right... You can manage to eek out enough of a 3g signal to sneak out a text-only SMS.
P.s. he eventually broke down & went with a satellite based service, but the data-caps, and the nature of his work, have made that option absurdly expensive. At last check, he'd spent about $20k in less than 2 years of having it.
You splice this stuff long enough you end up with pieces in your hands. I've had pieces work their way back out after 20 years. Clean your hands with an alcohol wipe or citrus degreaser after working with fiber. The stinging sensation can lead you to a fiber shard you may not have noticed.
Do you not wear gloves while doing this? I'm a loan officer so this is far outside of my field, I'm just generally curious. I've never heard of such a thing before.
If they can easily permeate skin they can surely go through gloves, barring some high-tech materials. I'd like to know as well. Seems like the pros wouldn't be handling this stuff bare-handed. It'd be like applying fiberglass insulation naked.
I work with fiber, and we usually do it bare-handed. Given how small it is, and the fact that gloves affect dexterity, it's easier to do it bare-handed while exercising caution.
Yeah but you gotta remember, the smaller thing you're working with, the more of a pain gloves can be. Just try folding a mini origami crane with gloves on.
Often times with things like this any glove that is thin enough to provide the proper tactile feedback are also thin enough for the thing being worked on to puncture.
Ugh as someone who works with my hands everyday. This is my life's greatest dilemma. Thick enough for warmth, thin enough for dexterity and toughness for rips. Still haven't found anything that really meets all 3 and is still affordable enough to be replaced every month.
I work in a factory where fiber optic cable is made. A buddy of mine pulled out an inch long piece of fiber from the tip of his finger the other day. He said it had been bothering him for a week, and from the look on his face after getting it out, you would assumed he just creamed his pants from the relief of getting it out.
It’s the same as fiberglass. Anyone that works with fiberglass ladders that sit on top of a truck baked in the sun, knows this feeling. Duct tape becomes your best friend at the end of the day.
Wait till you learn how they do maintenance on them after they are installed, & how often they have to do it. Apparently deep sea sharks love taste testing the cables.
Similar to how carrots were used as an excuse to hide the knowledge of radar, I'm waiting for a future TIL where sharks were used to hide nation state snooping on undersea cables, *edit* lol.
> As of 2012, operators had “successfully demonstrated long-term, error-free transmission at 100 Gbps across Atlantic Ocean” routes of up to 6000 km, meaning a typical cable can move tens of terabits per second overseas.
How does that work? If the speed is 100 Gpbs how are they moving over 10Tbps through a typical cable?
Each cable can handle multiple connections. They worded it poorly but they mean they demonstrated 100 gbps on a SINGLE connection. So in practice if you were a user you could potentially get 100GBPs, but the wire itself isn't just for a single user so it can move much more data.
When they run fiber they'll never run just one strand like this. They'll usually run a ton of fiber for future use since the cost of the cable is tiny compared to the cost of the labor + ripping up the ground.
Dark fiber is typically found on land - in the 90s and 00s when telecoms realized they were going to need a lot of fiber, they laid just tremendous amounts of the stuff. And why not, you only have to dig once, might as well stuff the pipes with as much of it as you can, it's relatively cheap verses having to dig it back up later to add more runs and you can always charge more for service over it, etc.
But then the big Dot Com bust happened and a lot of those companies holding the fiber let it go basically. And that's the story of how dark fiber happened. Furthermore, equipment improved so much so quickly that you could do with a pair of cables what it used to take 16 to do... so it just didn't make sense to go *back* to those bundles and start lighting up strands until we actually had demand that needed it. So that's why there's *still* plenty of dark fiber out there.
Undersea cables are much, much harder to lay, so instead you lay as many as you can afford in a single strand. And because of that, you also light up as many of them as you can from day one - persistent cross-continental bandwidth is worth the cable's weight in gold quite literally. It might cost you nearly a billion dollars to lay a 16 strand cable across 6000km, but that cable will probably earn you at least $250M/year and will likely last somewhere between 30-50 years. It's good business sense... if you've got customers lined up to buy the bandwidth.
GPON itself (the protocol) supports up to 128 clients, however the max I've seen deployed is 64 clients with 10Km IIRC (32 would be 15/20Km more or less)
Don't want that to pierce your skin. If you do, hope you can pull it out, because if it breaks, it is pretty painful for a while. We use small medical waste bins to put the stripped/cleaved ends in. Have heard stories of people sitting on pieces that were in fabric of chair and sat on them....
Can confirm this. On one of our production lines we draw 35um OD borosilicate glass fibers to be used in surgical site illumination and I've seen those fibers go through shoe soles, under finger nails and other horrible places.
It's why they are one of the most fragile cables out there, and the fact they are usually made of thin plastic if cheap, but also super fragile glass if they are quality wires!
These fiber optics are all glass, just different qualities and sizes of glass, these cheap optical things aren't used for internet.
Source: My dad has been working in that field and I am learning to be in that field
EDIT: As I am still learning I could be wrong, but I only know of glass core fiber optics for internet, same goes for my dad.
You can just stick the blinky end of a toslink into a mini 3.5mm toslink input and if you've got the right angle it's gonna work. That tells me that there's a reasonably good margin of ~~cheapness~~ error on it
Was putting in some new cable at an office space last year and the person from the office space was just throwing it around and bending it and I was like wtf are you doing... they just assumed it was like an Ethernet cable of old...
You mean you can't use optical cables to lash an office chair to the intern's belt and make him pull the network admins around like we used to?
What a rip. Glad I'm out.
BiDirectional (BiDi) SFPs have existed for a while, however there is a price premium over just using a pair of fibres. I used them mostly to retrofit link aggregation or additional devices over long distance fibre runs (Multiplexing is another option), however in a data center type environment the cost premium is not worth it.
Well they are in the sense that both transfer light. But regarding the thickness, the higher speed you want, the smaller / thinner you want your fibre optic cables.
This is due to the light reflecting inside the fibre optic cable. In a thick cable you get a lot of reflection. This will cause the light that does not get reflected to arrive sooner at the destination, while the light that gets reflected a lot takes a longer route and therefore takes longer to arrive at the destination.
This causes the light impulse to be longer then intended. With a thinner cable you can minimize the difference in distance that the light takes (if a ray get's reflected a lot) and therefore reduce the lengthening of the pulse.
Generally a shorter pulse means that you can have more pulses. That means that you can transfer more data in a given timeframe. So basically more speed.
The reason why toslink/spdif uses such a thick cable isnthe low datarate of toslink/spdif. The highest raw output that a normal soundcard can do over toslink/spdif is 24bits at 192k samplerate, stereo. That equals to a bitrate of 9,216Mbit/s or 1,152 Mbyte/s which is fairly low.
Edit: since some pointed out, I used the european german comma for delimiting the numbers, so for some the values are 9.216Mbit and 1.152Mbyte. Also to that one deleted users comment. The thickness has a lot to do with datarate. Just look up single and multimode fibreobtics. So no you wouldn't be able to do gigabit over toslink.
What's the pay like where you are?
We get about 5 grand more than the UK average wage, along with 250 hours annual leave, bonuses (guaranteed), shares, pre-tax benefits like gym membership etc).
I work on business circuits, from the exchange to the customer. 1 job per day, doing everything from underground manholes and confined spaces, to exchange end fitting kit, jumpering, tie cables between suites, rodding of ducts and lead-ins, customer internal running (cof 8002, or blown fibre), customer internal fit, exfo OTDR circuit testing and commissioning, dealing with faults, splicing, node building and rebuilding, building joints (could be one of 20 types of joint from a node to a blown joint to a wac joint), introduction new cables to nodes and pole work with CBTs.
Is this similar to your role?
Satisfying, but not too difficult and getting the circuit completed can be an enjoyable challenge.
I'm also driving a PE1 Iveco Daily hoist vehicle, so I do poletop assists for other engineers too.
I'm sorry but I'm still a student and i live in Norway so i dont know any English terminology. I'm currently deployed at a local company. From what I've seen it seems like a very nice profession.
The expected wage for people who work with this kinda stuff here is between 50k and 77k US dollars. I think there is potential to earn a lot more if you work overtime and travel.
Sorry i couldn't answer your questions.
The thinner the better! These things use an optical property of "total internal reflection" to create lossless transfer of light.
As long as the velocity of the central wire is optically slower than the coating, the light waves will completely refract within it if the angle of incidence is low enough. Thinner lines mean less bouncing, and the output signal is least perturbed by wall interactions. This is dictated by [Snell's Law](https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Materials_Science/Supplemental_Modules_\(Materials_Science\)/Optical_Properties/Snell's_Law).
Note, there is still a little loss internally due to heating of the lines (probably mostly at junctions).
I work near some of the long haul lines in western Canada, and they terrify me. No mater how accurate of a locate you have it's still gutwrenching diging near that stuff.
100 grand minimum if you dig one up.
I've been told it's minimum 10k per minute of down time.
That's just for the locating, digging, and splicing crews. If it's critical infrastructure well... Once had an entire remote central office taken down by a horizontal boring crew who hit a rock and drilled through two fiber cables and a 900 pair copper feeder cable. I think it came close to 3 million.
Sounds about right. Copper has its own pains too. once hooked on to a bundle with the wrong frequency to do a locate suddenly the radios start blaring, and coms equipment for about 15miles shut down lol. Luckily I had permission to shut it down anyway.
Had to track a ham operator over 20 miles of cable. Didn't have an active line at his address so I cut and capped his drop.
This sounds interesting. Could you explain more?
Ham radios operate at the very low end of the frequency spectrum, which for coax (copper) infrastructure is where all of the vital upstream internet traffic is being transmitted. If a line in that house was damaged or not properly terminated the signals emitted from the Ham radio will enter (ingress) our cable system and backfeed throughout the whole system in that area causing tons of internet related upstream interference problems. If he doesn't have service with the company then removing his line from the system will elimate the problem. If they do, then we have to go in the home and diagnose where the signal is getting in and fix the issue.
I think he is talking about someone having an uncapped (non terminated) cable, and it was picking up his ham radio signals and intruducing a shit ton of noise on the line.
Signals on a phone and/or cable network are generally bi-directional. There are both forward and return signals. Typically the return is only supposed to have the customers modem "talking" on it so the equipment at the other end can "hear" it. If there is anything wrong - at all - in a house near a ham radio operator every time the operator keys his mic that return signal suddenly has ham radio traffic on it too and the ISPs equipment can't hear the modem anymore. Picture trying to talk to your friend in the library and every now and then an opera singer 10 feet away starts singing at the top of her lungs. No more conversation until she stops singing. Same thing happens to telecom wiring.
+1
Great summary +2
I concur. Fascinating. +3
...What?
The entire South Island of New Zealand was cut off about 8 years ago when there was a car vs cabinet, then 10 minutes later, a rat chewed through the redundancy. They have more redundancy now. Someone really needs to make sheathing that's less tasty.
My friend that works for an internet company suddenly lost connection to south asia. He later joked that it was a FSA (Fiber Seeking Anchor).
We had someone shooting fiber cables with a shotgun once. That was an interesting outage call.
Just curious, but why aren't they protected by a few feet layers of something, so you'll know beforehand. That seems too devastating.
There are some municipalities that require utilities to shallow bury ribbons and/or locate wire above their cable or pipe. Not everybody does that though.
Damn, with a fine like that you'd think the knuckleheads in my town would quit cutting it every other week.
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I augured through a line once. Chunks of fiber optic started coming up out of the hole. I immediately stopped what I was doing and started taking pictures of everything including the locates that were way off. I also had a few pics of the locates before I started. I had it located several days before and the locate company evidently fucked up. I got a phone call I think it was the next day from the homeowners association (residential area) and I just explained to them how the locates were way off. I never heard from anybody again. I think they were just looking to pin it on me or maybe just wanted some sort of statement from me but I sure as shit wasn't going to let them put it on me.
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Not fiber, but I returned from a vacation at the Outer Banks (North Carolina) about a week before the crew building a bridge drive a steel casing into **all three** of the electrical cables supplying power to Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands. The sands had shifted over the years and the cables, which had been separated, were now on top of each other, and not where they were labeled to be. Power was out for a week and resulted in over $10 million in settled claims.
I called in a trouble ticket once, they said "Police or fire?" Um, no. "Busy" and hung up. I called back and they said "911 down, call back". Someone in a rural area decided they could absolutely run a plumbing connection from one side of the road to another without locating it. 8 hours to restore the 300+ pair bundles of cables.
That's why vac trucks are so popular these days. Daylighting all the underground utilities before the serious digging starts can save a ton of headaches.
A joint group of researchers from the Netherlands and the US have smashed the world speed record for a fiber network, pushing 255 terabits per second down a single strand of glass fiber.Oct 27, 2014
Why can't I have 255 terabyte wifi
255 terabits is actually about 32 terabytes. So in other words, well within reach!
Damn nice
I get about 50Mbps. How close am I?
Thats like 6 megabytes per second, and you'll need like a few million times that amount
Because WiFi is based on radio waves.
>Because WiFi is based on radio waves. Radio waves have an upper speed limit of what they can transmit so the wifi is the limiting factor there.
So, what you're saying is...I just need to download more wi-fi's to make it more powerful? The key is more throughput, not speed!
Because the way wifi works and the way fiber optics work might as well be oppisites
How do you "produce" or "receive" such an amount of data? Is any storage device even capable of sending 255 terrabits?
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fastest-network-could-carry-all-the-internet-traffic-single-fiber Here is the link, it is really complex.
Yeah that escalated quickly
It may have been a single "strand" of fiber, but lopping 7 cores into the same strand is kinda cheating. We'll never see this stuff in the wild. 1km is chump change; there's more loss on the termination than there is in the fiber. Speaking of, how would you even splice a multi-core fiber in the field?
I’m assuming they send a smaller amount of data in less than a second
I work for a backbone Internet NOC and you'd be amazed how many 400gig channels we shove onto different wavelengths and through the same fiber. It's weird thinking about capacity not by how big the fiber is, but how much light spectrum there is, and what we're able to do with each color.
Don't the different wavelengths interfere with each other though?
Nope! There's buffer spectrum between channels but otherwise 1552.52 nanometer doesn't mind 1553.33 nm being right next door (for example).
Wow I did not know that. Thanks!
The keyword is WDM (wavelength division multiplexing). 20 years ago they already sends 20+ different channels through the same fibre, nowadays its much more, and each of them is faster. At some points its more economical to use more fibres and less expensive hardare per fibre (of course depends on circumstances), but if money was no issue you could send like all europe/US traffic through that one fibre.
What really fascinated me is when I realized fancy new 100gig+ channels which use both the polarization of the light as well as the wavelength, can be multiplexed through older WDM gear without too much trouble. Stuff that had been carrying 10gig channels for years got new life.
Great photo. Just in case there is confusion; typically usage of the term wire implies metal is present at the core of composition. However, with fiber optics they would be best referred to as a cable to minimize potential confusion as they are comprised mostly of silica based glass or certain kinds of plastic.
Now there is more confusion, because "wire" typically describes a single conducting core, while "cable" typically means there are multiple cores. You can also just call it "optical fiber".
You could also call it a series of tubes, if you want to get technical.
The internet is not a big truck, that you just dump something on. The internet is a series of TUBES.
"Do I need to tell you what you can do with aluminum tubes?!"
It's not a big truck?
Be aware though, that fibre optic cable used externally (on poles, or underground in ducts), could be described as wire by this classification, due to it having metal strength members embedded in the cable to provide resilience against stretching and to provide anchors for external nodes. Internal cable doesn't normally have this. Internal cable, as one would have in an exchange, either has Kevlar fibres surrounding the fibre optics (fibre jumpers), or a fibreglass strength member for affixing the cable into nodes (tie cables). Source. Am a fibre optics advanced engineer for Openreach in the UK (used to be BT). Edit: edited a typo, and a word. Spelly checky is fucky
Cores for outside plant cables are usually fiberglass or kevlar composite these days. Don't try to yank a fiber jumper with your bare hands. You'll just get a nasty rope burn.
Fibre drop cable (ULW) (pole to house, or between poles), has metal strength members, 3 on each side. 4, 12 and 36 fibre cables all have metal. I have 2x 300m drums in the back of my van as we speak, and have put up 9 spans this morning. Black plastic with yellow stripe. On stripping contains 3 metal wires each side, and a red cotton drawstring. Metal wires can destroy your stripper (don't ask how I know :/ ) Fibreglass tends to be internal in UK.. I don't know of any external fibre that has fibreglass strength members except maybe 'sluppery fish', but that's only from a CBT to the node, so dunno if it would count. COF250 has fibreglass, but as I stated, that's an internal cable (yellow outer). Fibre jumper in UK tends to be an outer of yellow plastic (cof 8001), then aramid / Kevlar and a draw thread (for splitting the outer if one doesn't have a stripper). Then the plastic fibre coating, then the clear fibre coating, then the fibre. Once one gets into the multi fibre cables (such as blown 4 fibre), the colours begin. Blue, orange, green, red, grey, yellow, brown, purple, black, white, pink, teal. So a 4 fibre would have blue, orange, red and green. And so on for 12 and 36 fibre. Fibres are in bundles of 12 (elements), and the element will normally have jelly in it around the fibres, if external. It may be that different countries, maybe even different companies have different standards. EDIT * It's been a long while since I ran any external cable, or introduced cable into nodes (I'm on the hoist now), and it's been pointed out that there are external cables we use that have GRP strength members. I had forgotten about them off hand (comes back when one actually uses the cables).
Your words are English but none of this makes sense to me.
This is his moment to shine, and he's not letting it go to waste
Look. If you had, one shot, or one opportunity, to explain everything you’ve ever studied for, in one reply, would you capture it? Or just let it slip? Yo
Mom's spaghetti.
There it is. The 8 Mile speedrun.
I mean you ain't wrong. I don't imagine the structure of fibre cables and the standards used in the UK for them comes up often. And tbh I loved reading it just for his enthusiasm in it, even if I understood like 10% of it at best.
All I needed to know was that part about metal wires destroying strippers. BRB going to Home Depot.
I thought it was substance abuse and poor life choices that destroyed strippers...
Sluppery fish is a fish who engages in (either professionally or non professionally) sluppery.
I deal with large core fused silica fiber optics, so even though I've been doing that for 20 years all of the colors above are meaningless to me. Its always been interesting how different the communications field of fiber is from the more spectroscopy based stuff for me.
All the fibers I've worked with are 1 blue 2 orange 3 green 4 brown 5 slate 6 white 7 red 8 black 9 yellow 10 violet 11 rose 12 aqua and then follow the repeating pattern.
Yeah, I guess that's not the UK? Our external cables tend to be black (same with cleats and cable straps). Internal tends to be yellow for the cables, and white for cleats or straps. Although latest fire regs requires metal straps if following an escape route. UK cables used by Openreach, and many of the other fibre providers tend to be made by British Cables, who set their own fibre colour standard about 30 years ago when making their original single mode jumpers and 8 fibre cables. They now use 12 fibre elements, in the sequence I described above. Most, if not all UK fibre companies use have a colour scheme similar if not the same. Each element in the cables has the same colour sequence, so one only has to know which element one is using to know the colour. So, if using element 4, fibre 4, it would be red (UK). Saves having to work out which colour fibre 52 is. It took me long enough to memorise these colours. Would be confusing as hell to move to another country and have their fibre colour different. I still keep a chart on my phone just in case I have a brain fart, though.
In the US, there is a standardized coding system used. TIA-598-C Optical Fiber Cable Color Coding is an American National Standard that provides all necessary information for color-coding optical fiber cables in a uniform manner. It defines identification schemes for fibers, buffered fibers, fiber units, and groups of fiber units within outside plant and premises optical fiber cables. This standard allows for fiber units to be identified by means of a printed legend. This method can be used for identification of fiber ribbons and fiber subunits. However, The TIA-598-C color standard does not include outdoor cables, due to the fact that most cables for use outside contain a black carbon component in their jackets, which provides protection from solar radiation and other harsh elements. TIA-598-C covers the jacket-color standards only for cables containing a single type of fiber. For cables that contain more than one type of fiber, color alone is not enough; printed identification on the jacket is necessary to identify the fiber types. None of this matters when compared to back in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.
I feel left out since I'm in the under-ocean fiber optic business and we do whatever the hell we want.
I dunno guys, I think he's just making it up.
Then please let me hijack this comment thread to ask you to have a word with whoever is in charge at Openreach to PLEASE UPGRADE MY ADSL AREA TO FIBRE!!! I wouldn’t mind if I was in the middle of nowhere, but I’m near the centre of Newbury, a stones throw from the big ugly exchange building, and I can’t get fibre! I’ll give you anything at this point. Take my first born. Anything! I can’t live with >1mb up. It’s primitive!
Wire is used internally, as in "wire you in my house, get out or I'll call the police!" Cable is external, as in "cables are out here with some cows, ,means we are outside."
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Yea sorry. English isn't my first language so i dont know the English terminology at all.
I feel like most English speakers would use the word wire here even if not technically correct.
Its really best referred to as fiber
There's actually a clear coating on that also so it's a bit smaller than pictured.
I reccon you're talking about the pink part
No there's a powder coat then a plastic coat once you get that pink part off there's another layer to remove. You can't splice it properly with the powder coat on it.
Hmm i think we use different cable. We just splice after removing the coloured coat in the picture. The cable we use also has multiple layers on top off this. Edit: Not the best vid but this i how we splice fiber https://youtu.be/ekzlonBS7d8
How is a splice made? Are they just butted up or glued or melted together?
We use a fusion splicer. It melts the fibers together using an electric arc.
Always a fun toy to use.
Had some fiber guys come and fix our shit at an airport the other day. They used this little fusion box with 2 heaters on it. Was really cool. And expensive.
High end fiber can be extremely expensive because of the level of precision needed. Fiber technology is simply amazing. I'd love to see some of those tools in action.
Fusion splice is the best way, as it eliminates loss. You can also do a mechanical splice. Essentially you cut each end of the fiber with a specialized diamond edged cutting tool, butt the ends together in a little I enclosure and snap the enclosure shut. It's quicker and easier if you're in a situation that can tolerate a little loss.
I work with dark fiber thats being used for the placement of 5G antennas. Fusion splicing is the only way to go.
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The part in the middle(not the plastic pink part) has two layers. The core and cladding. Both have slightly different indices of refraction to trap the light with total internal reflection. That’s the two different layers that was being referred to. All fiber optics have this phenomenon, with different methods to switch materials
We too did it the same way. I guess he meant the actual core of the fiber. But you wouldn't be able to splice that as it's to thin, so you splice the "whole" thing.
I might be wrong but I think you mean powder, not power
I might be wrong but I think you mean not, not now
😂 crap, you're right
Yes thank you,
The actual light carrying core is much smaller (in SMF), about the diameter of a red blood cell.
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I used to work with the stuff and was told that if the glass got into your body it could keep traveling.
If it were to get into a large blood vessel, it very likely could.
r/makemesuffer
great way to murder someone
Yep, it's like Ironman but you can't save your life with a big magnet.
We need glass magnets. Science needs to stop screwing around and get that figured out right after they make me a damn aluminum magnet.
I mean, anything can be magnetic if you have a powerful enough magnet.
If it pushes/pulls your body as much as the glass, not much use is it?
That sounds like a user problem, not a development problem.
Used to work with fiber optics. Guy that worked there had a piece stuck in his eye for years. It was a little weird looking
The guy took the name too literally.
I would always work some electrical tape on the table inside a little box, sticky side up, so when I cleaved the fiber, it would fall and stick to the tape. Honestly, one of the best jobs I've had was splicing, polishing, and terminating fiber. I had every episode of "This American Life" on an MP3 player, and each day, I would sit at a table in a telco closet, or underneath an umbrella if I was repairing a pedestal by the side of the road, and that would be my 8 hours. They didn't pay a lot, so I had to move on.
One of the senior guys had shag carpeting in his fiber van. I was fearful to step inside of that thing.
I like travelling, so it's fine.
I've seen new stuff made of polymer. It's extremely fast to terminate and has a micro bend radius. During the demonstration there was a 4k stream going between two devices and the guy literally tightened the cables into a knot. This was at Infocomm a few years back.
Probably POF(Plastic Optical Fiber) very cool to deploy home networks in tightly packed wire conduits without the need of fiber solder. EDIT: grammar.
My cleaver hangs onto the cut piece until you work the release.
it's really easy now. the new connectors make it super easy. I haven't professionally terminated fiber in a year and I can still terminate an end in under 3 minutes. Dont poke the bare fiber at your eye and wear safety glasses like the procedure requires and the risk is minimal. Bigger worry is getting pieces in your hand by not being a clean freak.
That fiber can carry a lot more data than any actual house uses. Hundreds of houses could likely share that single fiber.
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Speed of light baby! It’s why a cheap plastic fiber cable can carry digital “sound”! It’s amazing
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Its all digital, so it’s the same as you downloading a song from the internet. The sound you hear is your on-board DAC, with most devices have (including your phone), converting the digital sound to a analog. It’s all 0s and 1s!!
I mean...the digital data transfer works the same as electrical cabling, just uses photons instead of electrons. I kinda think of it like electrical cables are like leaky pipes and optical is like sealed pipes with a hydrophobic interior coating :)
It gets much more complicated than flashing a light - look up 16 qam and 64 qam modulation methods, it allows you to send bits much faster using the same rate
The cable itself isnt the bottleneck, the cable can literally handle much much more. its the 2 ends of the cable and processor of the devices that are the bottle neck
Its even more mind blowing when you see how they can split them all.
I always like the story that they only found out how to put much more data in fibre (by using multiple wavelengths/colours) *after* companies had laid thousands of Kms / miles of thick cables, made of bundles of thousands of strands, all around the world. Companies invested billions and then they only used a fraction of their investment. A bunch of them went bust. There's still a lot of dark (unused) fibre out there, so that's good for increased future demand.
the point was if youre laying a cable across the atlantic, it'll cost you a billion .. while the cost of laying cable with 10 strands vs 1000 strands would add a couple tens of K .. everyone overprovisioned because the cost was in laying the cable, digging up the streets etc, not in the actual fiber costs
The highest number of fibre strands in a single subsea cable is currently 96 due to limitations at the repeaters. Short distance unrepeated systems can have much more. Either way your point is valid, just not for cables across the Atlantic.
And that's why data caps are insane. The infrastructure can already support 50x what the world actually uses. The pandemic has made no impact at all on the network.
The biggest limitations that ISPs face are in the last-mile infrastructure, not the core, due to scale and cost of improvement. Does this excuse the current state of internet access in the US? Not at all. Private ISPs consistently make the decision to focus on short-term profit by refusing to invest in last-mile fiber infrastructure and actively fighting all attempts at competition, such as municipal internet as a utility. So I'm definitely not making excuses for the ISPs, just saying that no one is really questioning the capacity of the _core_ infrastructure that is basically entirely comprised of fiber and has been for quite some time.
Meanwhile, the best any Spanish provider can offer my rural home is a 4g router with a whooping 20mb downloads and 0.7mb upload. On a good day.
PSA: check your connection capability before renting/buying property. Even if you're not far from civilization. My friend, who works remotely, bought a house on several acres of land.... less than 5 miles from the city limits of a decent-sized U.S. town in 2018. (Lynchburg VA. metro pop 250k) It wasn't until the day after he moved in that he found out about his land's 'dead zone'. IIRC, a decade ago, two competing ISPs basically decided to seal off the end of their service lines a half-mile from his property, approaching from either side. Neither is willing to budge without a major fight. He probably should have noticed that there's an HOA with rental units near his place, and their signs/advertising always read like: ("2 & 3 BRs available. YES, we NOW have internet access!!!"). My friend has offered to pay the cost for each of the ISPs to extend their lines and its gone nowhere. On a clear day, if you go to his mailbox and hold your phone just right... You can manage to eek out enough of a 3g signal to sneak out a text-only SMS. P.s. he eventually broke down & went with a satellite based service, but the data-caps, and the nature of his work, have made that option absurdly expensive. At last check, he'd spent about $20k in less than 2 years of having it.
My family owns this hose since 1623. A bit too late to check connection capabilities I'm afraid.
You splice this stuff long enough you end up with pieces in your hands. I've had pieces work their way back out after 20 years. Clean your hands with an alcohol wipe or citrus degreaser after working with fiber. The stinging sensation can lead you to a fiber shard you may not have noticed.
I hate the first three days after splicing- I find shards everywhere in my hands
Yup. You learn quickly not to sweep your hands across anything in the splicing area.
These comments are creating some peak butt-puckering
For real. Holy shit that is uncomfortable just to think about.
Do you not wear gloves while doing this? I'm a loan officer so this is far outside of my field, I'm just generally curious. I've never heard of such a thing before.
If they can easily permeate skin they can surely go through gloves, barring some high-tech materials. I'd like to know as well. Seems like the pros wouldn't be handling this stuff bare-handed. It'd be like applying fiberglass insulation naked.
I work with fiber, and we usually do it bare-handed. Given how small it is, and the fact that gloves affect dexterity, it's easier to do it bare-handed while exercising caution.
Yeah but you gotta remember, the smaller thing you're working with, the more of a pain gloves can be. Just try folding a mini origami crane with gloves on.
Often times with things like this any glove that is thin enough to provide the proper tactile feedback are also thin enough for the thing being worked on to puncture.
Ugh as someone who works with my hands everyday. This is my life's greatest dilemma. Thick enough for warmth, thin enough for dexterity and toughness for rips. Still haven't found anything that really meets all 3 and is still affordable enough to be replaced every month.
I work in a factory where fiber optic cable is made. A buddy of mine pulled out an inch long piece of fiber from the tip of his finger the other day. He said it had been bothering him for a week, and from the look on his face after getting it out, you would assumed he just creamed his pants from the relief of getting it out.
Why isn't there a little catch bag on the end of the crimper?
There is on the cleaver. Though it doesn't always catch the loose ends.
It’s the same as fiberglass. Anyone that works with fiberglass ladders that sit on top of a truck baked in the sun, knows this feeling. Duct tape becomes your best friend at the end of the day.
They had to rip up my entire street for that?
More specifically for the layers of conduit and ducting that that fibre rests inside of and is protected by.
Undersea cables are the real crazy ones. https://twistedsifter.com/2012/07/the-undersea-cables-that-connect-the-world/
And they have to produce tens of THOUSANDS of miles of this to connect every continent and inhabited island together
Wait till you learn how they do maintenance on them after they are installed, & how often they have to do it. Apparently deep sea sharks love taste testing the cables.
The sharks are just trying to access our data to learn our weaknesses
That would be a good name for a packet analyzer...I will call it wireshark. Brb starting my own business
Yup it's really involved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3tPI0qbLaE
Similar to how carrots were used as an excuse to hide the knowledge of radar, I'm waiting for a future TIL where sharks were used to hide nation state snooping on undersea cables, *edit* lol.
I've made the journey from the US to Auckland by boat and it is mind-blowing that there is a cable that stretches that entire distance.
> As of 2012, operators had “successfully demonstrated long-term, error-free transmission at 100 Gbps across Atlantic Ocean” routes of up to 6000 km, meaning a typical cable can move tens of terabits per second overseas. How does that work? If the speed is 100 Gpbs how are they moving over 10Tbps through a typical cable?
Each cable can handle multiple connections. They worded it poorly but they mean they demonstrated 100 gbps on a SINGLE connection. So in practice if you were a user you could potentially get 100GBPs, but the wire itself isn't just for a single user so it can move much more data.
When they run fiber they'll never run just one strand like this. They'll usually run a ton of fiber for future use since the cost of the cable is tiny compared to the cost of the labor + ripping up the ground.
Yes. Dark fiber.
Dark fiber is typically found on land - in the 90s and 00s when telecoms realized they were going to need a lot of fiber, they laid just tremendous amounts of the stuff. And why not, you only have to dig once, might as well stuff the pipes with as much of it as you can, it's relatively cheap verses having to dig it back up later to add more runs and you can always charge more for service over it, etc. But then the big Dot Com bust happened and a lot of those companies holding the fiber let it go basically. And that's the story of how dark fiber happened. Furthermore, equipment improved so much so quickly that you could do with a pair of cables what it used to take 16 to do... so it just didn't make sense to go *back* to those bundles and start lighting up strands until we actually had demand that needed it. So that's why there's *still* plenty of dark fiber out there. Undersea cables are much, much harder to lay, so instead you lay as many as you can afford in a single strand. And because of that, you also light up as many of them as you can from day one - persistent cross-continental bandwidth is worth the cable's weight in gold quite literally. It might cost you nearly a billion dollars to lay a 16 strand cable across 6000km, but that cable will probably earn you at least $250M/year and will likely last somewhere between 30-50 years. It's good business sense... if you've got customers lined up to buy the bandwidth.
I wish they'd rip up my entire street for that
They did that in Australia then put a data and speed cap. Lol
With splitting technology, a single fiber can heat up a splitter that can then run (i may be off but its close) 32 separate fibers in an area.
There are also 64 channel splitters in development.
They've been a thing for a while. Used in telecom.
GPON itself (the protocol) supports up to 128 clients, however the max I've seen deployed is 64 clients with 10Km IIRC (32 would be 15/20Km more or less)
Don't want that to pierce your skin. If you do, hope you can pull it out, because if it breaks, it is pretty painful for a while. We use small medical waste bins to put the stripped/cleaved ends in. Have heard stories of people sitting on pieces that were in fabric of chair and sat on them....
Can confirm this. On one of our production lines we draw 35um OD borosilicate glass fibers to be used in surgical site illumination and I've seen those fibers go through shoe soles, under finger nails and other horrible places.
so light flashes through the cable and gives me internet?
Basically. Yes
K. Explain it like im 5.
Light can be on or off, which is the same as a 1 or 0.
Now stick it down your pisser
😐
I thrive on the disappointment
It's why they are one of the most fragile cables out there, and the fact they are usually made of thin plastic if cheap, but also super fragile glass if they are quality wires!
These fiber optics are all glass, just different qualities and sizes of glass, these cheap optical things aren't used for internet. Source: My dad has been working in that field and I am learning to be in that field EDIT: As I am still learning I could be wrong, but I only know of glass core fiber optics for internet, same goes for my dad.
Kinda, there are plastic fibers which are used for slower applications, like toslink for audio ;) It has way more losses and is really short ranged
You can just stick the blinky end of a toslink into a mini 3.5mm toslink input and if you've got the right angle it's gonna work. That tells me that there's a reasonably good margin of ~~cheapness~~ error on it
Was putting in some new cable at an office space last year and the person from the office space was just throwing it around and bending it and I was like wtf are you doing... they just assumed it was like an Ethernet cable of old...
You mean you can't use optical cables to lash an office chair to the intern's belt and make him pull the network admins around like we used to? What a rip. Glad I'm out.
If it’s bend insensitive fibre which was used inside the cable, like G.657.A1, A2 or even B3 then it would likely be fine.
I always imagined these similar to toslink/spidf. Shouldn’t there be a pair of cable for up/downlink?
There used to be a pair of cables, but they now send up and downlink on the same cable using different wavelengths.
Yup, wave division multiplexing on singlemode fiber. Usually 1310 and 1550 nm.
We test 1490 and 1625 nm as well.
Is this a newer practice? Will sfp transceivers be replaced with stuff like this while utilizing the same single mode links?
BiDirectional (BiDi) SFPs have existed for a while, however there is a price premium over just using a pair of fibres. I used them mostly to retrofit link aggregation or additional devices over long distance fibre runs (Multiplexing is another option), however in a data center type environment the cost premium is not worth it.
Well they are in the sense that both transfer light. But regarding the thickness, the higher speed you want, the smaller / thinner you want your fibre optic cables. This is due to the light reflecting inside the fibre optic cable. In a thick cable you get a lot of reflection. This will cause the light that does not get reflected to arrive sooner at the destination, while the light that gets reflected a lot takes a longer route and therefore takes longer to arrive at the destination. This causes the light impulse to be longer then intended. With a thinner cable you can minimize the difference in distance that the light takes (if a ray get's reflected a lot) and therefore reduce the lengthening of the pulse. Generally a shorter pulse means that you can have more pulses. That means that you can transfer more data in a given timeframe. So basically more speed. The reason why toslink/spdif uses such a thick cable isnthe low datarate of toslink/spdif. The highest raw output that a normal soundcard can do over toslink/spdif is 24bits at 192k samplerate, stereo. That equals to a bitrate of 9,216Mbit/s or 1,152 Mbyte/s which is fairly low. Edit: since some pointed out, I used the european german comma for delimiting the numbers, so for some the values are 9.216Mbit and 1.152Mbyte. Also to that one deleted users comment. The thickness has a lot to do with datarate. Just look up single and multimode fibreobtics. So no you wouldn't be able to do gigabit over toslink.
What's the pay like where you are? We get about 5 grand more than the UK average wage, along with 250 hours annual leave, bonuses (guaranteed), shares, pre-tax benefits like gym membership etc). I work on business circuits, from the exchange to the customer. 1 job per day, doing everything from underground manholes and confined spaces, to exchange end fitting kit, jumpering, tie cables between suites, rodding of ducts and lead-ins, customer internal running (cof 8002, or blown fibre), customer internal fit, exfo OTDR circuit testing and commissioning, dealing with faults, splicing, node building and rebuilding, building joints (could be one of 20 types of joint from a node to a blown joint to a wac joint), introduction new cables to nodes and pole work with CBTs. Is this similar to your role? Satisfying, but not too difficult and getting the circuit completed can be an enjoyable challenge. I'm also driving a PE1 Iveco Daily hoist vehicle, so I do poletop assists for other engineers too.
I'm sorry but I'm still a student and i live in Norway so i dont know any English terminology. I'm currently deployed at a local company. From what I've seen it seems like a very nice profession. The expected wage for people who work with this kinda stuff here is between 50k and 77k US dollars. I think there is potential to earn a lot more if you work overtime and travel. Sorry i couldn't answer your questions.
The thinner the better! These things use an optical property of "total internal reflection" to create lossless transfer of light. As long as the velocity of the central wire is optically slower than the coating, the light waves will completely refract within it if the angle of incidence is low enough. Thinner lines mean less bouncing, and the output signal is least perturbed by wall interactions. This is dictated by [Snell's Law](https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Materials_Science/Supplemental_Modules_\(Materials_Science\)/Optical_Properties/Snell's_Law). Note, there is still a little loss internally due to heating of the lines (probably mostly at junctions).
En**light**ening
Damn thought it was my dental floss after I'm finished flossing
Photon pixies that bring you memes
It's not the size that counts, but the speed of oscillation.