Getting all the information at the same place is almost always a very difficult task, but there is no need to worry. We have compiled all the relevant information on Fiber Network Cable in this article. http://www.fibernetworkcable.com Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:59:16 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/5-college-consortium-seeks-to-buy-its-own-fiber-cable.html Who is looking: Five Colleges Inc., the consortium comprising Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, all in rural western Massachusetts. What they are looking for: To buy existing and new fiber-optic cable and install it to form a "ring" connecting the five institutions, with a "leg" connection from the ring to Springfield, Mass., to the south. The five institutions expect to take advantage of the current downturn in the fiber-optic industry to increase their data-network capacity, add redundant links to handle network outages, and reduce their local-circuit charges for data-communications services. The four private colleges have been paying what a technology official describes as "exorbitant" rates for local telecommunications circuits to connect their campus networks to the University of Massachusetts, which serves as the data-communications hub for the consortium. When the deal is finished, the colleges will no longer have to lease local circuits. "We're moving out of the era of leasing services and into the new era of owning our own assets," says Rosio Alvarez, associate chancellor for information technologies at UMass. The state university, which has a 10-year lease on a fiber connection from its campus network to Springfield, no longer faces the same local-circuit costs that its partners do, but it is interested in the higher-bandwidth connections to the colleges and the redundant connectivity that the ring and new leg will provide. How they are going to use it: The five institutions, which have cooperated on information-technology projects since the 1980s, will have new capacity for "all sorts of high-bandwidth applications among the campuses," including videoconferencing, says Ms. Alvarez. The colleges expect to pay less for their connections to the Internet and to the Internet2 research-and-education network because they will get volume discounts. From Springfield, the consortium will use the services of fiber-optic carriers that... articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/fiber-optic-av-cables.html According to ASM Labs, Inc. (410 East O'Dell Street, Marionville, MO 65705), their new Mongoose cable is the first fiber-optic cable system for stereos, VCR's, and other home audio and video gear. The Mongoose cable uses analog optical signals to send information up to a distance of 2.4 miles while "eliminating the noise, interference, and attenuation associated with wire cables." The all-analog format means no digital conversion is necessary, so there is no loss of information, jitter, or need for error correction. The system includes a small electronic transmitter that plugs directly into an audio or video component and converts the output signal to an optical signal. The signal is sent over the fiber cable, which ends in a receiver that converts the optical signal back to an electrical impulse. The small receiver plugs directly into the component via a standard RCA-type connector. The transmitter and receiver are powered by separate, isolated, linear power supplies. As with wire cable, each channel of audio or video information requires its own optical cable, but several pairs of optical fiber can be mn in the space needed for one pair of wire cables. The optical fiber cable has a 3mm outside diameter and is lighter and more flexible than wire cable, but far more expensive. Prices: Set of transmitters and receivers for stereo audio (including four power supplies), $649. Transmitter and receiver for video (including two power supplies: $369. Twin-lead optical cable for audio: $125 for the first meter, $10 each additional meter. Single-lead video cable: $62.50 for the first meter, $5 for each additional meter. articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/fiber-optics-technician.html Fiber optics is the communications technology that works by sending signals from one location to another in the form of light guided through hair-thin fibers of glass or plastic. These signals can be analog or digital-voice, data, or video information. And even though it's glass fiber, it has more strength and greater tolerance to abuse than copper wire. It can transport more information longer distances in less time than any copper wire, and it is becoming more cost effective to use. The technology began about 30 years ago in the R&D labs in telecommunications companies. By the mid 1980s, fiber was replacing copper, microwave, and satellite links. In the 1990s, cable television companies began using fiber to enhance the reliability of their networks. Soon they began to offer phone and Internet service on that same fiber. Computers and LANs started using fiber, about the same time as the telecommunications companies. There are two major kinds of fiber optics cabling: outside plant fiber optics cabling and premises fiber optics cabling. Telephone companies, cable TV companies, and the Internet all use outside fiber optics cabling. These long lines of cable can contain more than 200 glass fibers and may be hung from poles, buried underground, pulled through conduit, even submerged underwater, and may stretch from a few thousand feet to hundreds of miles. In contrast, premises cabling is installed inside a building or links buildings on college campuses and involves lengths of cable rarely longer than a few hundred feet. It contains 2 to 48 fibers per cable. Few installers do both outside plant and premises cabling. Description Technicians install cables following precise schematics planned and designed by engineers. They also locate and repair defects in existing systems--placing, rearranging, and removing cables when necessary. When working on computer networks, technicians run the cable through the... articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/fiber-optics-introduction.html The development of optical fiber technology has been a critical milestone in the global telecommunications and information technology revolution. The ability to communicate worldwide on demand would not have been possible without the development of low-loss silica fiber as a broadband medium for transporting voice, video, and data traffic. At the time the laser was invented in 1958, it was already recognized that communication using lightwaves offered immense potential, but it took some twenty years before a practical medium capable of transporting light pulses around the world was developed. The manufacture of optical fiber began in the 1970s and has been accelerating at an incredible pace since that time. Today, optical fiber is being installed worldwide at a rate of about 3,000 miles per hour--a distance of three times around the world every day. At the same time, the data-carrying capacity of each strand of optical fiber is doubling every year as technological advances in photonics and electronics permit more and more wavelengths of light to be transmitted at ever-increasing data rates. Commercial systems that transmit 400 Gb/s over a single optical fiber (equivalent to 12,000 encyclopedic volumes per second) are now available. Several laboratory experiments conducted during 1999 demonstrated that capacity increase will continue for the foreseeable future. These experiments included: - 1.60-Tb/s transmission over 400 km using 40 individual wavelengths of light, each moduated at 40 Gb/s( n1); - Transmission of a single wavelength channel at 160 Gb/s over 300 km using practical semiconductor technology( n2); and - Transmission of 1,022 wavelength channels using a single laser source.( n3) It is often asked how long this rate of progress can continue. The region of optical transparency of silica fiber where the attenuation is sufficiently low for long-haul transmission is approximately 50 THz. If the explosion in bandwidth continues... articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/fiber-optic-network-brings-york-county-schools-high-speed-access.html Several school districts in York County, Pennsylvania have joined forces with the York Area Technology in Education Consortium (YATEC) to bring extended network capabilities to students. Using an infrastructure designed by Hyperion Communications, a leading competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC), and using equipment from Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc., students have high-speed access to the Internet and distance learning from computers in the county's school buildings. The effort grew out of the districts' need to share course information within a single network. YATEC checked out 28 companies that handle hardware, software, Internet access, and network connectivity before selecting a network design from Hyperion. YATEC wanted a network that could handle different protocols, transport high-quality video, and share hardware that would provide those on the network with access to each other as well as to the Internet. After making their decision, the consortium went live with a wide area network that connects the districts' administrative and school buildings to a Hyperion central office in York County. "This allows the districts to expand their curricular offerings and tie into institutions of higher learning to offer high school students college-level courses," says Dick Evans, first chairperson of YATEC and a founding board member of the consortium. "The districts also want to be able to offer online conferences and workshops to teachers to reduce the time and costs related to travel." articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/fiber-optic-network-brings-york-county-schools-high-speed-access-choosing-a-network.html Choosing a Network Four YATEC member school districts are actively tied into the network. Central York has eight buildings connected, York Suburban and Dallastown each has five, and West York has four. The York City and Dover districts also are members of YATEC and soon will join the network. The consortium's primary goal was to have a state-of-the-art network infrastructure. "We wanted to create a network with high-speed access, high bandwidth, high reliability and little to no lag time --particularly for Internet access," Evans relates. The network provides native 10BASE-T Ethernet connections at each site with Internet access provided by dual-redundant T1 connections to network access points in Washington, D.C., and New York City. There are four separate OC-3 rings spread throughout the county, with a total of about 20 school buildings on those rings. Fujitsu Network Communications' FACTR SONET access and transport platform is in place at each school building, and each school uses a FASTLANE Ethernet LAN interconnection card set. The FASTLANE cards provide provisionable bandwidth, with the YATEC services running at 3 to 10 megabits per second (Mbps). The Ethernet traffic is converted to ATM cells and transported across the OC-3 SONET access rings. At the central office, the traffic is terminated as DS3 drops on Fujitsu FLM 150 lightwave add/drop multiplexers (ADMs). The DS3 UNI (user network interface) signals are placed on an OC-12 backbone ring. The OC-12 ring connects to the BlazeNet ISP site, where an ATM switch and router converts the DS3 UNI ATM signals back to Ethernet frames and provides the Internet access connection. Originally, the network design called for the school districts to buy a large number of routers. In this scenario, Hyperion would have handed off T1s to be carried back to BlazeNet. As the project proceeded, the school districts sought... articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/fiber-optic-network-brings-york-county-schools-high-speed-access-strength-in-numbers.html Strength in Numbers With the network design in place, each school district is connected with 3 to 10 Mbps of bandwidth to the ISP. The network's total backbone capacity is 45 Mbps. One concern about the network was whether it could handle simultaneous requests from several users. "Within 45 days of the network going live, 228 students at Central York signed on from different computers and intentionally requested the same Web site at the same time," says Evans. "In less than two seconds, every user had access to the site." There also was concern about whether two different suppliers' equipment would communicate -- in this case, providing the Ethernet-to-ATM cell conversion on different products. In addition, the network carries both Internet Protocol (IP) and AppleTalk traffic, which created some initial network challenges. Regular IP traffic passed through the network without problems, but the AppleTalk locations would get disconnected. This required the equipment to be reset to bring those locations back on the network. The solution was to segment the IP and AppleTalk connections outside the ATM switch, resulting in what Guth described as a dean handoff between the two suppliers' equipment. He credits Fujitsu's dedication and support for the network's success. "Fujitsu basically put every resource necessary on this to make sure it worked properly," recalls Guth. Currently, the network is primarily used for Internet access and research purposes. Each district also uses the network to share data among its own school buildings as well as to connect to the best educational resources the other districts have to offer. Still, each district independently maintains its own technology program. Cost is a barrier to quicker expansion, but the consortium is working to cut the price to participants to make it competitive with the popular, straight T1 access available from other providers.... articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/history-of-optical-fiber-technology.html Traditional telegraphy used wire to transmit voice signals. However, the practical frequency limit for metal wire is a few megahertz, since the increase in resistance with frequency causes intolerable loss. Coaxial cables developed in the 1940s enabled transmission up to 10 GHz, and, later, millimeter waveguides allowed transmission to 100 GHz. This technology was abandoned when inexpensive optical fibers were developed as a suitable transmission medium for optical communication. The confinement of light by total internal reflection was well known in the 1850s. Glass fibers based on this principle were developed for endoscopes early in the 1900s. However, even as late as 1966, the best such fibers had losses of 1,000 dB/km compared with 0.2 dB/km today. The use of low-loss glass fiber for communication was first proposed in 1966 by Kao and Hockham,( n4) who suggested that the intrinsic loss of silica-based glass could be low enough to enable use as a lightguide. At the time, absorption was dominated by impurities in the glass, so research throughout the world concentrated on improved purification of conventional multicomponent glasses. Just as these efforts began to succeed, they were supplanted by better processes involving vapor deposition of high-silica glass, first reported by Maurer( n5) in 1970. Vapor deposition processes were refined to compose two categories--outside vapor deposition (OVD) and modified chemical vapor deposition (MCVD), reported by MacChesney et al. in 1974.( n6) Kao, Maurer, and MacChesney received the 1999 Draper Award for their pioneering work. Achieving low loss required: - Pure starting materials provided by high vapor-pressure chlorides of silicon and germanium, - Reaction of those materials with oxygen at high temperature, and - Processing in an ultraclean environment containing chlorine for further purification. The first fibers so produced were multimode guides having a core diameter of 62.5 Mu m to facilitate... articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/networking-cable.html HOW WILL EXPANDING DATACOM/NETWORKING technologies affect connector manufacturers? The vast majority of nonresidential computers are linked in a network and more and more home computers are networking as well, creating many connection opportunities. The modern local area network (LAN) industry dates from 1979--Ethernet, Token Ring, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), FDDI, Fiber Channel, residential access lines, digital subscriber lines (DSL), HFC, FTTC. The Internet started in 1969 and 30 years later has exploded. The big issue on the Internet is deploying bandwidth to keep up with demand. Data transmission in premise networks, short-reach (less than 100m) telecom, and computer interconnects are dominated from copper interconnections up to1Gbit/sec. data rated. Further increase in the date rates demand the use of optical fibers. Nineteen-ninety nine was billed as the year of the Home Network. The Home Phone Networking Alliance (HPNA), Home RF, Bluetooth, CEMA, and other groups that have standards in the works for home networking will evolve to make these available to vendors. One billion dollars will be spent on home networks during the next three years. There are 50 million U.S. households which already use the Internet, more than 18 million of these homes have two or more PCs, and 73 percent of new PCs are sold into homes of current PC owners so they might want to network. Looking at connector and cable assembly trends, the emphasis is on networking for servers, especially the business scalable types driven by Internet connectivity, home networks, interconnectivity of handhelds, i.e., personal digital assistants, mobile telephony, global positioning systems, etc., and finally, connecting the ubiquitous desktop PC and its peripherals via faster and faster digital serial interfaces like USB, IEEE 1394 FireWire, FC-AL, ATA/66, and wider ultra-SCSI. Looking at connector and cable assembly trends, the emphasis is on networking for... articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100 http://www.fibernetworkcable.com/general/robotic-system-installs-fiber-optics-in-sewers.html The city of Mississauga, Ontario, recently served as the testing ground for a new robotic system that can install fiber-optic cables inside sewer systems. The robot, known as the Sewer Telecommunications Access by Robot, or STAR, was developed by Stream Intelligent Networks Corporation, of Toronto. The robot is remotely navigated through sewer systems to place fiber-optic cable and thus build an underground information infrastructure. Many sewer systems are being wired in this way, but the installation is done by humans and often requires road lane closures and digging. "We are looking to make sewers the information highways of the future," said Steve Spooner, Stream's president and chief executive officer. "You have instant access to every block in the city, so cities will soon be fully wired throughout for high-speed Internet." Spooner said that STAR has the capability to install cable in one-eighth the time of other installation methods and that the robot is capable of installing 2,400 ft (732 m) of cable per day. STAR is about 6 ft (1.8 m) long and is equipped with five cameras so that the operations can be monitored from a truck. Once the robot is fed into a manhole, it drills holes in the pipe wall and fastens the cable using tie-bolts. articles - General Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:29:52 +0100