Communication Needs

fibre optics?

1. wat r some environmental, economic, social and political impacts of fibre optics? 2. how has fibre optics revolutionized the speed of communication in the science community? 3. wat r some advantages and disadvantages of quickly accessing information with the help of fibre optics?

Public Comments

1. Wow ... big topics. 1. a) Environmental: Fiber requires much less maintenance than copper lines. It dissipates no heat and does not corrode. As such, it can last decades with no maintenance. This means it can be buried underground or even laid on the ocean floor with a very long life expectancy. This means that nature does not have to be disturbed by additional digging after the cable has been laid. b) Economic, social, political: With respect to deployment costs, fiber is much cheaper per kilometer than copper cable, saving people money. Its performance and low cost allows places like India to have low cost communications with the US. This gives the US access to labor with low cost, which saves money for some and puts others out of work. This also creates political issues when people are thrown out of work. 2. Fiber has orders of magnitude more information bandwidth than copper cable. This means that the cost of transferring information over cable is dramatically cheaper. This has made international phone calls and data transfers cheap. This allows scientists and their machines to share information and analyses quickly and cheaply. 3. Most of the disadvantages are short term. Fiber was initially deployed between large metropolitan centers, so that people did not have direct access to fiber at their homes. This means that their access to high speed service was limited by the copper lines feeding their homes. This problem is being resolved by a technology called fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), which is bringing fiber directly to homes. Having access to enormous amounts of data means that even more powerful search engines are going to be required to sort through all the data. This is expensive technology and time consuming to develop. However, the existence of search engine technology means that technology development will be more efficient and quicker.