Why optical fibers are one of the most important?

This is an odd if not obvious question to answer.

If you go to http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_traffic/index.php you will see that there are millions of fiber optic cables running under the ocean, under the ground, in drainage pipes, and on telephone poles. You'll find fiber in the oddest places. Ever notice that 6 inch wide cut in the street that runs for miles? Fiber.

Fiber is the backbone of all data, voice, telemetry, and other types of commutations. It's capacity to carry (depending on the type of fiber) data at light speed, millions of connections at one time is unsurpassed.. One simple strand of fiber can carry more than one stream of data. Different spectrums of light are utilized to maximize capacity. Typically one cable contains mutable fibers. Thus multiplying it's capacity.

I seriously doubt that anyone cutting one under sea cable or even a terrestrial cable would cause much damage. The redundancy and nature of the Internet and telecommunications world is (in many cases) over built. If one cable goes down, another takes over. The Internet was designed this way for military purposes. Before the Internet existed it was called ARPANET. It carried both military and public data. The network was split due to security issues. Now we have the Internet and Milnet.

Many engineers believed that the deployment of fiber would not be rapid enough to feed the growth of the Internet and other networks. At one point Bill Gates was about to deploy over 800 LEO (low earth orbit) satellites. The fiber beat him and the project was shelved.

Before fiber all we basically had was copper and satellites. Copper's ability to handle data pales in comparison to fiber.

I hope this answered the question.

Justin Petersen

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