Laying fiber optic cable -- when?

The way I see it, at least for my home, wireless is just a temporary situation until it makes sense to run fiber. (Will continue to have some limited wireless for mobile devices: laptops, PDA phone, etc.)

I'm to lazy to run ethernet cable throughout my house, but fiber would make sense...

But when? Fiber was supposed to have replaced everything except power lines "Any Day Now" for decades! I remember reading articles about it in the

1980's!

What is the holdup?

Reply to
bc20
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cost....

Reply to
Tom E

Then it'll be never. Fiber inside the home isn't a good idea, nor is it necessary. Why? Basically because it's fragile and expensive to terminate (the outlets and the cables).

Fiber to the premise makes more sense. The wires are pretty much fixed in place and aren't going to be screwed around with.

But inside the house or office? No way, it's just not worth the hassles and expense. Not now and not likely ever.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

It looked like a good idea to some people in the mid 90's when wired ethernet was limited to 10M. For sure a few people did put it in. I am almost sure I heard of an investment bank in London that did fibre to the desk. Then we got 100M Ethernet and the need vanished. Now of course 1G on copper.

As I understand it - *very* limited - this is still baseband signalling (oh maybe 1G is not quite) so prepsumably if broadband techniques were used then that rate could go up a lot (by orders of magnitude). Of course the encoding delay goes through the roof, just depends on what you want.

1G seems to be sufficient for todays applications. In many cases propadation delay dominates application performance.

Well we now have 10G over copper apparently, I have never seen a 10G port of any kind though.

Reply to
bod43

I guess what I'm thinking is one fiber cable could be used for everything: LAN, internet, TV, phone, video, music. Who knows what that would lead to. Devices could start using all that smartly merged together...

If fiber were mass produced, wouldn't that cause the price to come down?

I'm imaging decades from now when every house could be a (HD)TV broadcast "studio"...

Reply to
bc20

I have TV, phone, LAN, internet and music all over ethernet cable under my floors.

Bwahahah. That depends on the manufacturers stopping from using proprietary interfaces. which will be when hell freezes over, or cellphone makers agree on a standard connector for their chargers.

It /is/ masss produced :-) Its just expensive to work with. Have you ever tried to work with glass wires? :-)

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

You're right to be skeptical, but here is yet another such announcement, like similar others that have come before: "Standardized Cell Phone Chargers Are On Their Way"

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Reply to
Char Jackson

No. It's still a rather messy production process. (9 mins) Actually, un-clad fiber is relatively cheap. The jacketed and protected fiber cables cost money. Also, attaching connectors requires considerable practice and patience.

Incidentally, there are 3 different diameter fibers (50, 62.5, 125 microns), a mess of "colors", and at least 6 different connectors.

I "bought" this mess from the local recycler. I now have 2 more boxes of the same stuff. I'm not 100.0% sure, but it's apparently *ALL* defective. It's the stuff that failed various tests from a local cable production house.

There's another problem. Fiber can easily do 100MBits/sec or gigabits/sec. Do you really need that to move 3Kbits/sec POTS voice? Higher speeds costs higher dollars. When you're trying to move everything from slow voice to fast video, the only way it's going to be cost effective is if the volume is going to pay for the overkill. That may happen when we start seeing Toshlink connectors on more than just home theater boxes. However, even Toshlink is overpriced because it's overkill for moving digital audio. For the time being, CAT5 for everything from POTS voice to video is good enough. Wait for the industry to shake out the losers, and then wait for home networking to adopt whatever works in industry.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Ugh.. That video made me ill from all the gushing and self serving public relations buzzwords. This video clip shows more detail on the optical fiber production process: 5 mins

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Which is being done now, more or less, with FIOS. Fiber to the home, in turn distributed inside the home by copper. Either by coax or ethernet.

The hassle is in the connectors and how they're attached to the ends of the glass strands (it's not wire in the classic sense). It has to be optically aligned properly and doing that is not inexpensive. This as opposed to copper which any DIY nitwit can set up.

Oh joy, youtube idiots in hi-def. Blech.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

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