Fiber Optic Communication - FAQ, News & Trainings

Achmad has designed a fiber optic simulation software which is freely avaible for download. Here is the software’s description:

Fiber Optic Simulation Application is a simulation application that simulate meridional and skew rays inside fiber optic cable.This application can simulate step or graded index fiber. It also can simulate single or multimode for meridional ray.For skew ray, there’s only single mode.

The download link is here: http://achmadz.blogspot.com/2008/03/fiber-optic-simulation-application.html

LumiGram SARL, a French high tech fashion and design company started by the famous fashion designer Jacqueline, has come up with a line of table clothes, sculpture, throw pillows, and among other things fashion tops that are all made out of or incorporate arrays of LED illuminated fiber optics creating a shimmery, colorful glow of light.

Some are AC powered and others are battery operated (AC powered fashion tops are available as window displays). The table cloths, pillows, and sculptures could be of interest to an architectural lighting designer (perhaps even the clothing if they’re a particularly fashionable lighting designer ) working on finishing upscale commercial venues or perhaps a private residence that wants that pulse-pounding dance floor look at night. Swaths of illuminated fiber optic fabric can be used as swags or tapestries.

Anyrate, these are all handmade items that are fun and highly unique and they incorporate two of my favorite things, fiber optics and LEDs. Definitely different.

Google has joined the Unity consortium, which will build a $300 million fiber optic cable linking the US and Japan. The 7.68 Tbps, 10,000 kilometer (6,200 mile) will increase capacity for ever growing internet traffic between continents.

Google seems to be taking a keen interest in the infrastructure of the internet, first with the auction of the 700Mhz radio spectrum, and now undersea cables. And no wonder. The search giant needs always on, unfettered connectivity, and having to rely on tiered-internet happy ISPs for that connection is doubtless a big worry. Much better to control the whole shebang, end to end.

Press release [Google]

The Vietnamese government has arrested ten people, including the alleged ringleader, in the theft of underwater fiber-optic internet cables by fisherman who may have harvested the lines thinking they were unused Vietnam War-era copper cables that the government has said were fair game for recycling. according to the Thanh Nien news site.

Police in the southern Ba Ria Vung Tau Province arrested and asked prosecutors to indict Nguyen Thi Bich Phuong, the owner of three vessels found carrying tons of pillaged fiber-optic cable last month.

Phan Minh Tiep, a boatman under Phuong’s payroll, was also arrested. Phuong and Tiep could be charged with “destroying major public national security projects” and possibly face the death sentence.

The three ships’ captains have too been arrested and will face prosecution. Confessions obtained from the three have implicated Phuong as the ringleader of the thefts. The confessions also indicated they began stealing the cables in March this year.

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A flotilla of ships may have been dispatched to reinstate the broken submarine cable that has left the Middle East and India struggling to communicate with the rest of the world, but it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions.

According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday. Since then phone and internet traffic has been severely reduced across a huge swath of the region, slashed by as much as 70% in countries including India, Egypt and Dubai.

While tens of millions have been directly affected, the impact of the blackout has spread far wider, with economies across Asia and the Middle East struggling to cope. Governments have also become directly involved, with the Egyptian communications ministry imploring surfers to stay offline so business traffic can take priority. “People who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do,” said ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur.

But as backroom staff at businesses across the globe scrambled to reroute their traffic or switch on backup satellite systems, experts said the incident highlighted the fragility of a global communications network we take for granted.

“People just don’t realise that all these things go through undersea cables - that this is the main way these economies are all linked,” said Alan Mauldin, the research director of TeleGeography. “Even when you’re using wireless internet, it’s only really wireless back to your base station: the rest is done over real, physical connections.”

Despite the clean, hi-tech image of the online world, much of the planet remains totally reliant on real-world connections put in place through massive physical effort. The expensive fibre optic cables are laid at great cost in huge lines around the globe, directing traffic backwards and forwards across continents and streaming millions of conversations simultaneously from one country to another.

One expert suggested that this week’s accident should be a “wake-up call” to convince governments that keeping such connections secure should be a higher priority. Officials must spend more time and energy making sure that critical communications such as mobile phones and the net are adequately protected - whether from disaster or a terrorist strike, said Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism at the Gulf Research Centre in Dubai.

“This shows how easy it would be to attack,” he said. “When it comes to great technology, it’s not about building it, it’s how to protect it.”

Although the direct effect of the Mediterranean accident is being felt as far west as Bangladesh, the greatest impact has been in India, which has the world’s fifth largest internet population and an economy that is increasingly reliant on hi-tech communications. The Indian stock markets had already closed when reports of the collapse first surfaced on Wednesday, but the impact of a 50% drop in bandwidth was being felt keenly yesterday - particularly by the country’s expansive outsourcing industry.

American corporations were reporting a number of problems with their Indian-based support services and call centres as the domino effect kicked in, although a spokesman for BT - one of Britain’s biggest outsourcers - said the company had so far seen little direct evidence of problems. Countries in east Asia and the Pacific remained unaffected as they pipe most of their internet traffic to Europe through the US, but it could be several weeks before things are back to normal in the affected countries.

“It will depend on how bad the damage is, but they’ll find the sections in question and bring them up onto a ship for repair before sinking them again,” said Mauldin. “It could take a week or possibly two weeks.”

The fibre optic wires in question - called Flag Europe-Asia and Sea-Me-We 4 - are some of the most vital information pipelines between Europe and the east. The latter, which runs in an uninterrupted line from western Europe to Singapore, had only recently been opened after a mammoth £500m, three-year installation project. Between them, the two lines are responsible for around 75% of all connectivity in the Middle East and south Asia.

“The problems are really at pinch points where increasingly huge amounts of information are coming through,” said Jim Kinsella, chairman of Interoute, Europe’s largest fibre optic network provider. He said that improvements are scheduled for submarine cabling, but that plans to send more internet traffic over land connections rather than under the sea had been set back by political wrangling.

“The whole subsea franchise operation is due to change dramatically in the next 18 months, but the question is how we cope in the meantime. You always have to assume that this kind of thing is going to happen.”

OK, so its not quite as sensational as it sounds— UK scientists have been trying to simulate conditions near the event horizons that shroud black holes, and they’ve cleverly simulated a horizon using pulses of light in a special optical fiber. So, no disastrous gravity well was made and the World didn’t suddenly end with a horrible crunch. But they did create an analog of a black hole that helped them understand some of the weird and whacky physics that goes on near real ones.

The team actually made “completely harmless” black hole and white hole horizons in pairs, at a rate of 80 million a second, by piling up and stretching out ultrashort light pulses in the modified optical fiber. They even detected blue-shifting effects at the white hole horizons, which is predicted by theory.

Next on their agenda may be examining even more interesting quantum stuff like the radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking in his “black holes ain’t so black” theory. And that’s just cool.

When it comes to bandwidth, there are few grails as holy as fiber-to-the-home, also known as FFFFTTTTTTTTHHH. But it hasn’t been very cooperative. Fiber optic signal dies if it is bent at 90 degree angles twice, so you’re screwed unless you live in a round house. Corning, prodded by Verizon to come up with a decent optical conduit, just announced a fiber that is 100 times more bendable than the stuff used today.

It’s based on a nanoStructures optical fiber design, in case any of you optics nerds were wondering. Corning’s president, Peter Volanakis, sung its praises in a press release:

“We have developed an optical fiber cable that is as rugged as copper cable but with all of the bandwidth benefits of fiber. By making fundamental changes in the way light travels in the fiber, we were able to create a new optical fiber that is over 100 times more bendable than standard fibers.”

My favorite analogy was from Corning spokesman Dan Collins, talking to the AP:

“This design relies on nanostructures that serve as a mirror or a guardrail, and as the fiber is turned or bent, the light doesn’t leak out. We have wrapped the fiber around a ball point pen and it retains its effectiveness.”

What does it mean for seriously badass bandwidth? Are we talking Löthberg fast??? The requisite Verizon boilerplate only left us guessing:

“This fiber technology will enable us to bring faster Internet speeds, higher-quality high-definition content and more interactive capabilities than any other platform which exists today,” said Paul Lacouture, a Verizon Telecom executive.

Thanks Paul. I guess the specs will have to wait.

Google is not leaving anything to chance, and according to an Australian newspaper is now planning to span the Pacific Ocean with its own undersea fiber optics cable to blast the world with its do-no-evil goodness. Owning a fat pipe like this will make Google the Big Dick of the high seas, making it cheaper for the company to move data and to dominate all those other weasels that are selling internet bandwidth.

Let’s hope Google’s alleged entry into this bandwidth biz will bring prices down, because with the way things stand now, even though there’s a glut of dark fiber spanning the Pacific, the stubborn owners of all that potential bandwidth aren’t budging on their too-high prices. Do it, Google, and get going on that wireless carrier threat you made, too! Teach the rest of the world your catchphrase: “Don’t be evil.”

While Verizon is out aggressively trying to sell the country on their FiOS fiber optic web connection packages, which range from $40 per month for 5Mbps to 30Mbps for $180 (extra for TV and phone service!), Hong Kong residents can now enjoy their own fiber optic connections from Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited… which happen to be a fraction of the price and many times faster than what we can get here. Yes, HK residents can now get a whopping 100Mbps fiber optic connection for a mere $48.50 a month. And that’s the entry-level package.

How about 200Mbps for $88.20? Yeah, not quite enough, I agree. You might as well jump up to 1Gbps for $215.40 a month. But hey, you don’t really need that, do you? You should be thanking Verizon for the opportunity to pay them for a pathetic 5Mbps connection. I mean, the US is so far down on the per-country broadband speed chart (the Japanese are enjoying 60Mbps average) that we should just be loving any crumbs the telecoms are willing to toss our way, right? Thanks again, Verizon!

The New York Times just took a peek into the world of Japanese fiber optic broadband, which we all know is much faster and cheaper than ours. While we here in the States might view the Japanese broadband market as some utopia where entire HD movies can be downloaded in seconds, it’s not quite that simple.

It seems that NTT, the biggest fiber provider in Japan, has a lot of the same issues Verizon does here: they need to get permission from landlords to hook buildings up with fiber, and once they do they still need to convince people to sign up for it. And after all the big apartment and condo buildings are hooked up, they’re stuck doing individual houses.

Overall, setting up a fiber optic network is a very expensive prospect with no real guarantees to making all that money back. Without a lot of current applications that utilize such crazy speeds, there just isn’t a big enough demand to justify the expense. So why does Japan throw caution to the wind and spend all sorts of cash to set up this speedy network even though it might not be the most fiscally responsible thing to do in the world?

Well, one of the big reasons is that the Japanese government provides tax incentives for companies to do so, while our government has done basically nothing to encourage a nationwide fiber network. Despite the fact that setting up a completely new wired infrastructure is an incredibly expensive undertaking (just ask Verizon), companies in America are supposed to do it all themselves and make it profitable, something that might not make sense with this situation.

Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, said that “the Japanese think long-term. If they think they will benefit in 100 years, they will invest for their grandkids. There’s a bit of national pride we don’t see in the West.” I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than just national pride and wanting to be first, but there’s certainly something to be said for setting up a network now that we’ll need in a few years. Chances are, eventually we’ll have a nice, fast, cheap, nationwide fiber network that will allow us to download porn faster than we could ever have imagined before, but at the rate we’re going, it’s going to be a while.