For most people the fierce debates and battles about fiber-to-the-home (FttH) will have been invisible or boring. Only specialized webzines and bloggers or a good journalist have understood what has been going on.
This will most likely change in the near future: FttH will be something we will be getting used to. So what is the reason there is so much fuss about fiber? This post is the beginning of a small series trying to give you some background on a thin wire with a very disruptive power. So lets start with the basics.
Telecommunication means “communicating over a distance”, sending signals back and forth.
You can send signals through the air (sound, radio) or through a guide (wire). The nice thing about sending signals through the air is that everybody can pick them up at the same time, which is at the same time its major drawback. The nice thing about a wire is that it guides and confines the signals, but you have to have a wire first. Lets focus on signals over wires.
Signals tend to weaken with distance until they are unreadable. Usually high frequency signals weaken quicker than low frequency signals. Like if you walk to an open air popconcert: you here the bass notes from very far away, the high notes only when you are close. So if we have a wire travelling a certain distance there is a maximum signal frequency you can send over the wire before it becomes too weak to read at the other end. The longer the wire the lower the maximum frequency.
The amount of information you can send over the wire (per second) is limited by the maximum signal frequency,
Now we have a key indicator of the quality of a wire for telecommunication: the best wire lets high frequencies travel far without weakening.
Fact is that the copper wires used for telephone networks are quite bad at this. The coax cable as used for cable-TV networks is already quite an improvement. Glass fiber is more than a million times better. Thats why 98 % of all the (globespanning and local) networks are built from fiber….except the last part to your home.
