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What exactly is fiber optic communication capable of?

I've been doing a lot of looking into Fiber optics and Fiber to the Home. throughout all of my searches i have yet to land on a page telling me the exact capabilities. Anyone know what this stuff is capable of? I mean, when we reach the point of fiber to the outlet with new home construction are we eliminating telephone and cable jacks? How many simultaneous forms of media are capable of being transmitted over a single fiber optic feed? phone, internet, and "cable" television? Any help would be appreciated, this stuff is fascinating!

Public Comments

1. It's not really what, but how quickly! Fiberoptics media wise can do the same thing as your other things, but is a lot faster! Fiber optics has something to do with light; and light is a lot faster than being electronically transfered. (sorry for bad grammar)
2. It's able to handle a high bandwidth without much interference. Higher bandwidth means you can send more digital information.. Phone is quickly moving towards VoIP, TV will go IPTV.. So in the end it'll all be TCP/IP (internet protocol). But for things like High Definition TV you'll need a lot of bandwidth. Fibre is capable to run at those speeds.
3. ok fiber is capable of a much more than any other type of media...the exact specs i dont know. but fiber is mainly used for getting the media signal to the homes on the telephone poles. after it gets to your house you switch back to coaxial or cat 5. to have fiber in home would be too expensive which is why you havent found any specs on it. so really until fiber becomes more affordable it wont be in home.
4. the speed of light is theoretically the fastest anything in our entire universe can travel.... As for speed its technically the fastest way to transmit binary code. A standard Home Optic line has 12 ribbons with 24 binary lines to transmit, the ammount of information transmited is generally limited by the number of Ribbons within that line, if you got a higher caliber cable it would have much more paths to take and could transfer more information at a time.. Other than that it depends on the devices that are using the cable speed to send/recognize incoming information... making its potential limited only to the speed of light.
5. The physical limitations of what can be pushed through fiber optic cables has not been reached yet. New techniques are still being developed to squeeze and compress and run different wavelengths of light across fiber optic cables in order to increase the speed and amount of data that can be pushed across the cables. Here in Japan, fiber optic to the home is already being offered for cable and internet service. With IP Phone offereings already out there (Skype, Vonage, etc), you can eventually eliminate the copper wires coming into your home for those services provided you have a provider that can support you. Inside the home is another issue. Copper wire is still the cheapest and most sensible thing to put inside a house aside from wireless technology. Fiber optic equipment is very expensive--too expensive for the home right now. Give it a few more years (maybe 50) and perhaps everything will be light driven--at least until they find something else to use!
6. I'm not an expert, but here's what I've learned thus far... I don't think you can put a limit on the media, it's the encoding of the data that seems to change. While this is a vast oversimplification, the main differences between fiber and copper is that fiber is not susceptible to interference from outside cross-talk (noise going from one wire to the next) and fiber doesn't have the loss on long runs that copper does. For example you can create a Fiber 10Gb network backbone using either copper or fiber. Cat6a cabling can have runs as long as 110m. Fiber, on the other hand can be used for upwards of 10KM. Initially fiber bandwidth was higher, but advances in copper seem to have closed the gap. Still distance is the main benefit of fiber. Assuming all the sources are digitized, there should be no limit on the number of sources, per se. The limit is the overall throughput of the network to deliver that data. Phones (VOIP), for example uses very little bandwidth (128kb). HD Video (1080p) is upward of 6Mb. Figuring out how much bandwidth you need is like figuring out how much electricity you need. At up the requirements of the sources you want to do simultaneously and then create a network that can support it.
7. Currently fiber optic cable is capable of 10Gbps but in theory that could go up to hundreds of gigabits. It means you can transmit many simultaneous video channels as well as phone and internet. High quality video streaming takes about 10Mbps so you can get 1000 channels in 10Gbps.
8. Many answers, good luck http://www.toboc.com/forum3/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1004 http://www.toboc.com/forum3/default.aspx?g=posts&t=909
9. Please contact your telecomm service provider in your areas. Optic Fibre multi core cable can provide multiple channels e.g. 8 core fibre cable can provide 4 concurrent connections. Fibre cable has following benifits over normal copper cable 1. Clear Voice Communication 2. Very less data error rate 3. Immune against Radio Frequency/Electromagnetic Interference/Cross Talk 4. Operates at a very high speed data rate and much more