For a few years, few, the term fiber optic has been installed in our daily conversations, among many other things, due to the race undertaken by the telecommunications operators to take us home.Without going any further, recently the Orange fiber has exceeded the figure of 10 million connected homes. But the most curious thing is that behind this figure, if we scratch a little, we find many others that are tremendously surprising, and that make us think of the great ignorance that the public in general has about this medium, although, as I say, it is in our daily conversations. Let's see some of these curiosities.
To connect these 10 million homes, the cable installed by Orange exceeds 40,000 kilometers and would go around the world through Ecuador ! If we join all the fibers that make up the installed cables (each cable is made up of several fibers) we would go around the Earth 54 times, which means more than 2 million kilometers or more than 5 times the distance from Earth to the Moon .This figure will increase even more in 2018 when Orange fiber reaches 14 million connected homes.
It is no less surprising to know that, to travel those distances, a pulse of light would take about 7 seconds; or that along that path of 40,000 km of cable have been left in addition, 5 million of registration boxes and other accessories necessary for your connection.
orange fiber as a human hair network
Considering its physical characteristics, it is also amazing that, knowing that the thickness of the fiber is approximately 0.1 mm (comparable to the thickness of a human hair) for that fiber, 10Gbps services are already offered, or which is the same ten billion bits per second ; or that, considering that the weight of an 8-fiber cable is 30 kg/km, the cable needed to connect Seville with Bilbao could be transported in a single truck.
And with all these data, it is inevitable to arrive at the following question: How far will our fiber reach in a few years? Although we can start to shed some light, and never better, on that issue.A year ago, a group of British researchers created a fiber optic that had the ability to transmit data at 99.7% of the speed of light.There are still a few years, however, for consumers to enjoy This fiber, designed for supercomputers and data centers.But let's think that, for now, that of our homes reaches 69% of the speed at which light circulates: 744.679.518.105 km/h.
Discover the map of submarine cables that connect the world
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