Plastic Fiber Could Make Optical Networking a DIY Project 170
An anonymous reader writes "A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person. The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home." A mere "few hundred metres" of 100mbps (since plastic is thus far dimmer than glass) would suffice to wire any home I'm likely to occupy.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Copper is much more expensive than plastic, and 8-wire CAT5 cabling is a lot harder to run than a plastic filament, to boot.
Re:I see an inconsistency (Score:1, Informative)
Not likely, as they don't increase the intensity of the light, only the rate at which it is turned on and off.
The Article (Score:3, Informative)
Plastic fibre slashes optical network costs
Wed, 01/09/2008 - 19:49 - Wire Services
A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person.
The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home.
The project partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the 'edge' network.
"We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology," Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the project, said. "If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole."
Plastic fibres use harmless green or red light that is easily visible to the eye, as opposed to glass fibres which use infrared laser light that could potentially cause eye damage.
"I have a two-year-old child," says Nocivelli, "and I would never install a glass optical fibre in my own home, even though I have been working with glass optical fibers for many years."
Plastic fibres are also much thicker than glass fibres, a millimetre or more, and can be handled without special tools or techniques.
"You don't need to be trained to handle and install it. You just cut it with scissors, plug it in and it works. It's as easy as that," Nocivelli adds.
On the downside, plastic fibres absorb light more than glass, which limits their useful length to a few hundred metres.
They also have a lower data capacity than glass fibres, but that is not an issue for the cable that runs from a conventional glass fibre in the street into a house, or even for laying a network within a block of flats.
The partners have built a system that uses green light to transmit 100 megabits a second over a distance of 300 metres, which is the speed telecom companies hope to offer their customers five to ten years from now, and 50 times as fast as a typical adsl broadband connection.
Their second achievement is to transmit ten times faster still - one gigabit per second - over a 30m fibre, using red light.
By the end of the project in June 2008, they expect to have extended that to 100m.
"Then, of course, we will try to focus on longer distances," says Nocivelli. "We have already demonstrated that plastic fibre would be future-proof not only for the next ten years but for the next 30 years. With that speed in your home you could download a full DVD in thirty seconds."
The POF-ALL members have not had to develop any novel technologies, as they have built their systems using the latest off-the-shelf components and the ingenuity and skill of the ten academic and industrial partners.
Two products are already coming to the market. Luceat is commercialising an optical Ethernet switch (a router) using plastic fiber technology and the Fraunhofer Institute is looking for partners to market an integrated optical transceiver to work at one gigabit a second with plastic fiber.
Home and office networks could be rewired with plastic optical fibre so simply and cheaply it could be a do-it-yourself job.
"It's future-proof," confirms Nocivelli. You run at 100 Mbit/s today, 1 Gbit/s tomorrow and maybe 10 Gbit/s in the future."
A follow-up project, POF-PLUS, is intended to further develop optoelectronic components for plastic fiber and is awaiting a final decision on EU funding.
The article (Score:4, Informative)
Wed, 01/09/2008 - 19:49 - Wire Services
A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person.
The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home.
The project partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the 'edge' network.
"We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology," Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the project, said. "If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole."
Plastic fibres use harmless green or red light that is easily visible to the eye, as opposed to glass fibres which use infrared laser light that could potentially cause eye damage.
"I have a two-year-old child," says Nocivelli, "and I would never install a glass optical fibre in my own home, even though I have been working with glass optical fibers for many years."
Plastic fibres are also much thicker than glass fibres, a millimetre or more, and can be handled without special tools or techniques.
"You don't need to be trained to handle and install it. You just cut it with scissors, plug it in and it works. It's as easy as that," Nocivelli adds.
On the downside, plastic fibres absorb light more than glass, which limits their useful length to a few hundred metres.
They also have a lower data capacity than glass fibres, but that is not an issue for the cable that runs from a conventional glass fibre in the street into a house, or even for laying a network within a block of flats.
The partners have built a system that uses green light to transmit 100 megabits a second over a distance of 300 metres, which is the speed telecom companies hope to offer their customers five to ten years from now, and 50 times as fast as a typical adsl broadband connection.
Their second achievement is to transmit ten times faster still - one gigabit per second - over a 30m fibre, using red light.
By the end of the project in June 2008, they expect to have extended that to 100m.
"Then, of course, we will try to focus on longer distances," says Nocivelli. "We have already demonstrated that plastic fibre would be future-proof not only for the next ten years but for the next 30 years. With that speed in your home you could download a full DVD in thirty seconds."
The POF-ALL members have not had to develop any novel technologies, as they have built their systems using the latest off-the-shelf components and the ingenuity and skill of the ten academic and industrial partners.
Two products are already coming to the market. Luceat is commercialising an optical Ethernet switch (a router) using plastic fiber technology and the Fraunhofer Institute is looking for partners to market an integrated optical transceiver to work at one gigabit a second with plastic fiber.
Home and office networks could be rewired with plastic optical fibre so simply and cheaply it could be a do-it-yourself job.
"It's future-proof," confirms Nocivelli. You run at 100 Mbit/s today, 1 Gbit/s tomorrow and maybe 10 Gbit/s in the future."
A follow-up project, POF-PLUS, is intended to further develop optoelectronic components for plastic fiber and is awaiting a final decision on EU funding.
Re:Best way to put ends on fiber? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)
People seems to automatically associate fiber with high speeds and long distances.
But in reality, plastic fiber does not have those capabilities. A plastic fiber intended for 100Mpbs will work with 100Mpbs, but it cannot be upgraded to higher speeds in the future. The multimode characteristics of the fiber limits the bandwidth.
You only get the super high performance if you use single mode glass fiber. And that stuff is very expensive and complicated to work with. The end equipment is also quite expensive. The single mode glass fiber itself is cheap thou..
Fiber has bend radius limitations, and will not work well if you bend the fiber sharply. CAT5/CAT6 also has bend radius limitations, but is more forgiving. It will work fine even if you make a sharp 90 degree bend.
In general, plastic fibers are no better than CAT5/CAT6. Sometimes it is even inferior to CAT5/CAT6. The only technical advantage plastic fiber has over CAT5/CAT6 is the eletrical isolation, which makes it more or less immune to lightning.
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
If that doesn't make sense, let me explain it this way: light doesn't travel straight down a fiber optic cable. Instead, it bounces back and forth down the cable, first hitting the cladding at one side and then hitting the cladding at the other. That's why the light can go around curves; its not traveling straight, its bouncing back and forth off the walls. The index of refraction for the cladding material is much higher than the index of refraction for the fiber, so the light obeys a principle called "total internal reflection" instead of the cladding absorbing it.
Some photons go pretty straight, rarely hitting the walls. Others bounce off the walls a lot. That changes distance they travel, which changes the time it takes them to reach the other end. With a thick plastic cable, the ones that bounce a lot will travel a much longer distance thus you have to space the changes in the signal further apart for them to be detectable at the other end of the cable.
Make more sense now?
Could? It already is! (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like they're solving problems, badly, that have already been solved. MS Windows and their broken "shortcuts" if anyone remembers? If I didn't think it was just plain ignorance, I would claim this was a well-disguised FUD piece.
Re:MOD Parent up please (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Copper is much more expensive than plastic (Score:3, Informative)
once W. is gone and the tax cuts for ethanol is rolled out (please), then realism will take hold of corn, and we will see corn being used in plastics.
Even with the massive subsidies corn gets corn prices will still go up. A better feed stock for plastic is hemp [hempplastic.com]. But how well will Bioplastics [wikipedia.org] work for fiber?
FalconRe:MOD Parent up please (Score:5, Informative)
Also, we've got quite a bit of recyclable plastic sitting in landfills. More than we could ever possibly need. Likewise, there are a few new "plastic" materials on the horizon that can economically be produced from plants.
Plastic was made out of plants, hemp was a good feed stock, before oil was used to make it. Which is part of the reason hemp was made illegal. In the mid 1930s, before the Marijuana Tax Act [wikipedia.org] of 1937 basically made hemp illegal, DuPont was granted patents on making plastic from oil.
FalconRe:So... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Best way to put ends on fiber? (Score:1, Informative)
I've heard (but not seen in action) that there are now fibre equivalents of crimping kits. You clean the end of the fibre and clamp it to the ends. It's supposedly much faster and only creates one join so less loss. This would probably be a better option to just terminate a few cables.
Good article here [lanshack.com], although it reckons using crimps wouldn't suit your situation as it takes some practice.
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
Probably thinking about RF channels, where SNR is a major factor in speed. With most fiber runs, it is not. Except for long-haul multi-kilometer runs, SNR is always pretty high.
The problem is optical and modal dispersion.
Optical dispersion is the same phenomenon as a prism - light travels different speeds depending on frequency. This causes pulses to spread. The higher the speed, the larger difference between min/max frequency of the light, the more spreading that occurs. Over singlemode fiber, optical dispersion is usually the limiting factor on speed, unless compensated for. (There are ways to do so.)
Modal dispersion is best described as the light having multiple paths it can take from one end of the fiber to another. These paths are not of equal length, so it makes pulses spread out too. Modal dispersion usually dominates optical dispersion, except in single-mode (very narrow, very hard to work with) fiber. Thick plastic fibers will have significantly worse modal dispersion than even multimode glass, imposing a pretty nasty length*speed limit on the fiber. Fortunately, for this application, length is short allowing for usable speeds.
That said - Some of the 100M Ethernet standards already use visible light and LED emitters, so this new effort isn't a gigantic leap.
They unfortunately are focusing (apparently) on internal building wiring, where fiber (esp. plastic multimode) loses many of its advantages over copper. "last mile" outdoor cabling provides far more advantages to fiber (Lack of EMI susceptibility, corrosion resistance, etc.)