The idea that information travels in different ways is not a recent one.
Whenever we speak into the telephone line, a wired cable carries the
signals from our voice into the wall socket. From there, traveling
through an extensive network of wires, the information reaches the other
end.
Similarly, cellphones work in a different way as well, in
that they send and receive wireless radio waves. The technology is known
as wireless because it does not have any cables attached to it.
Outdoor optical fiber cable
Another
contender for information transfer comes in the form of Fiber Optics.
The fiber in fiber optic refers to the cable through which the
information is transferred, while the optic part deals with the method
through which the information is transferred, which is an optical beam
of light that travels down the cable, which is usually either glass or
plastic.
The history behind Fiber Optics is interesting since it
was originally introduced to support endoscope examinations in the
1950s. Using Fiber Optics, the doctors could see inside the human body
without having to cut or open it, making it a huge breakthrough of the
time. In the 1960s, engineers figured out that the same technology can
be used to transmit telephone signals at the speed of light (which is
normally 186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second inside a vacuum, but it
slows down to two-thirds the speed in a fiber optic cable).
Before
moving on the importance of Fiber Optics, we feel that it is important
to provide you the entire picture about Fiber Optics, beginning with the
anatomy.A typical fiber optic cable consists of thin strands of glass
or plastic, also known as optical fibers. The cable can consist of as
few as two strands or even two hundred, depending on the cable. Each
strand is tenth the size of a human hair. Pretty insignificant, right?
Wrong. Because a single strand is capable of transferring almost 25,000
telephone calls which make an entire fiber optic strong enough to carry
several million calls.
The fiber optic works by carrying
information from one place to another using entirely optical
(light-based) technology. To demonstrate how the light travels through
the cable, you would need an example. Let us suppose that you wanted to
send information from your PC to a friend’s house. You could join up
your computer to a laser, which would help to convert electrical
information from your computer into a series of light pulses that
travels through the fiber optic cable. The laser will travel down the
stream of the cable and emerge at the other end. Your friend would need
to have a photoelectric cell (light detector) to convert the laser
impulse back into the electrical information so that it could be
understood by the computer. The whole apparatus is like a really neat,
or advanced version of the kind of telephone you can make from two cans
and a length of string!
The Wall