Fiber vs. Copper; What do we really need?

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what about air conditioning tho?

👍︎︎ 46 👤︎︎ u/diestache 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies

Let's also just ignore that fibre-cables are a lot more sensitive to permanent damage than any copper based cable. This would be an absolute nightmare for consumer products.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/koffiezet 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies

Why I haven't heard about this channel before. It has very interesting videos.

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/d1xt1r 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies

Standard fiber solutions can be upgraded and are being upgraded all the time through better software. This isn't happening in copper.

👍︎︎ 10 👤︎︎ u/Tonkarz 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies

I was head of IT for a radiology group that crossed state lines. To each our our sites we always ran fiber. We had both a dark fiber loop that was leased that we lit up and also lit fiber from a few different telephone companies. For our use cases, we had to use fiber and bring it to the buildings, no choice about it.

Where we did have choice, was how the teleco delivered us the handoff from their equipment to ours. We always always always chose electrical handoffs (copper).

Now you may ask why:

1- it’s faster, technically. In reality, you aren’t going to notice the difference. But the electricity travels faster through the copper wire than the light travels through the glass. Just a fact if of physics.

2- usually the run from the telephone company equipment to our router was a few meters. Telecos usually like to hand-off using SMF. This can be a very strong laser at short distances, and you need to attenuate the fiber signal accordingly or you get very slow speeds.... or the equipment works but you burn the module out. Either way, it’s a pita and you don’t have that issue with electrical/copper.

3- SFP modules tend to be vendor specific.

4- port availability - most of our routers had 7 network ports but only 2 SFP/SFP+ ports.

There were a couple runs that we had between buildings where the distance exceeded 100m and we did run fiber, at 10 Gbps.

👍︎︎ 37 👤︎︎ u/ericstenson 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies

Obviously fibre ftw

Copper doesn’t give me 10,000Mbps internet

👍︎︎ 20 👤︎︎ u/Naekyr 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies
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Remember that time I made a video about TOSLINK? I sure do, it was just last week! (almost) Well, before I ended that video, I left you with a question. Why haven’t we seen fiber... *THUNDER CLAP* [ominous music] You’ve angered the Hi-Fi gods! You said TOSLINK is impervious to electromagnetic interference “but what does that matter in the digital space?” But you didn’t mention ground loops and the devastation they cause! OK, OK, just, settle down! I’ll address that. Right now! When you connect two pieces of equipment with an RCA cable, you also connect their respective grounds together. In some circumstances, this can create audible humming or buzzing because even though the signal being sent is digital, the amplification circuitry is not. Because it is connected to ground, if there’s an imbalance between the two grounds of the sending and receiving equipment, that creates a current in the ground of the signal wire which can affect the analog amplification circuitry. Because TOSLINK is an optical signal, the two devices are galvanically isolated and it doesn’t matter in the slightest if there’s a ground imbalance. TOSLINK is, in effect, an opto-isolator and this benefit should not be ignored. Now, I would like to provide an explanation for my careless oversight. For every person who touts the benefits of TOSLINK, there’s another that complains about clock jitter. Those individuals claim that if you’re encountering a ground loop, “for the love of god don’t use TOSLINK with all its totally real imperfections, sort out that problem you heathens!” Audio forums are worse than Twitter, each of you likes what you like and anytime anyone presents any opinion regarding the pros and cons of one system over another, y’all lose your minds and get real pretentious and I’m just kinda over that. I, admittedly, chalked up the concern for ground loops to be one of those opinions, but it’s not. TOSLINK can, does, and has many times presented a meaningful solution to the problem of ground loops or other electrical noise issues, and it may in fact be the entire reason Toshiba developed it. It is interesting to note, however, that the ground loop problem seems to have gone away in the age of HDMI. Whether that’s down to better isolation inside the equipment itself or some other thing, it suggests that the problem could have been solved without going to an optical fiber. It may have just been easier (and, let’s not forget, cooler) to use TOSLINK. Alright, now that that’s taken care of, let’s get back to the question at hand. With TOSLINK being developed in 1983, why haven’t we seen fiber... *THUNDER CLAP* You’ve angered the IT gods! You referred to CAT5 cable as Ethernet! You fool! Ethernet is a standard series of protocols and fiber optic cabling is routinely used in larger networks! You’re right. I am but a lowly network plebeian, barely capable of setting up a WiFi router. Forgive my callous equation of Ethernet and that cable. It won’t happen again. Wow, we’re almost three minutes into this and we haven’t even gotten to the question at hand. So. Why haven’t we seen fiber optics in the consumer space aside from TOSLINK? Actually, in some very niche circumstances we have, and as the IT gods reminded us, it does exist in big networks, but I’m talking on a broader, more basic scale. Your average consumer is probably familiar with things like USB, HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, Eth..., I mean, Cat 5 cabling with 8P8C (often incorrectly referred to as RJ45) connectors, and maybe FireWire or SATA or perhaps other things. All of these use wires, like some sort of technologically regressive lazy person. Why not use light? Well, let’s start with the obvious thing. TOSLINK works great for connecting pieces of audio visual gear together because each one will have its own power source. All that needs to get sent between them is a little bit of data. But lots of things need power, too. Have fun using that keyboard and mouse connected to your computer by nothing but light. And, as we moved away from the days of RS-232 serial connections and into the holy land of the Universal Serial Bus, suddenly we found that we’re not sending little bits of power just to keep your mouse alive. We’re sending loads of it. I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent here... Oh who am I kidding I do this all the time. It seems like USB turned into the power delivery standard it is today kinda by accident. Remember that even in USB 2.0 days, officially a device could only draw 2.5 watts, and that was considered high power. In those wild west days, different companies were coming up with their own ways to determine the current a given port could supply, and it wasn’t until 2007 that the first USB Battery Charging specification appears, finally getting everyone on the same page and allowing for USB ports on computers to finally, officially, provide more than 500ma when asked nicely. Anyway, now that USB is ubiquitous, we can expect any modern device to provide a decent amount of power through its USB ports for things like portable hard drives, charging your phone, and of course the monumentally important task of powering all those RGB LEDs in that gaming keyboard you bought because, you know, +5 Agility. But you may recall that the switch from USB 2 to USB 3 didn’t just involve making the data transfer go faster. The 4 conductors of the USB cable weren’t enough, so we had to add more of them for USB 3. Five more, to be exact. Add too many more and we might as well just start using HDMI for everything. But with fiber optics, we could potentially have much, MUCH faster data throughput using only a pair of optical fibers. Or, potentially, just one if you, for instance, send data in each direction using two different wavelengths of light, and separate them with a prism on each end. So sure, we need to send power to devices in addition to data. Why not create some sort of composite cable (no, not that kind) a cable that is a composite of both optical and electrical? Like a USB cable where the data lines are replaced with optical fiber? Then, the same cable could be used for nearly everything! Alls we gotta do is just make the LEDs go blinky blinky a little faster and we coulda been using the same cables since the ‘80s! Well, not so fast. Heh. Not so fast. Optical fiber is complicated. It doesn’t seem like it should be, after all what are we really doing but flashing a light source and moving it somewhere else so we can see the flashing and decode it, but thanks to … PHYSICS, it’s not actually as simple as that. Stupid physics. Making everything difficult. I don’t want to get too far down this particular path because its importance to potential consumer standards is arguably minimal, but it’s important nonetheless. Since light travels at the speed of… light, it may seem as though a pulse of light down an optical cable will reach the other end in exactly the same way that it was sent. But… it won’t. Thanks to a phenomenon called modal dispersion, also known as multimode distortion, multimode dispersion, modal distortion, intermodal distortion, intermodal dispersion, and intermodal delay distortion (jeez guys pick a name already) the signal actually gets a little smeared. Let’s imagine we send a pulse of light down this optical fiber. Will it all get to the other end at the same time? It seems like it should, it’s light after all. But just because something happens as fast as we know things can happen doesn’t mean geometry doesn’t apply. If the individual photons in that pulse of light manage to stay perfectly parallel to the sides of the fiber, they will all arrive at the other end simultaneously. But this is the real world, and nothing’s perfect. Some of them are gonna enter the fiber at an angle, which means they don’t take a straight path. They bounce off the sides, and although total internal reflection keeps them from leaving the fiber, this zig-zag path is much longer than a straight line so those meandering photons will in fact arrive later. And this limits the speed at which we can pulse the light on and off and still have it be intelligible on the other end. This is that smearing of the signal. Even though on the sending end we’re putting in a clear-cut, on-off signal, on the receiving end the photons who lollygagged and bounced around in the fiber cause the signal to look like this. Some of the photons from the last pulse manage to arrive at the same time as some of them from the next one. So, we have to limit the frequency at which the pulses happen in order to make the received signal decodable. This means that optical fibers do actually have a bandwidth limit. Just because we’re using fiber optics doesn’t mean we have theoretically endless upgrade capacity. That said, you might have already surmised that the bandwidth limit depends on how long the optical fiber is. No matter how poorly the light behaves in the pipe, if it’s a short pipe then the time difference between straight-and-true photons and disastrously off-course photons is quite small. And this is why discussing the bandwidth limitations of a given optical fiber is not really a big deal if we’re dealing with consumer applications where cables aren’t likely to go beyond 10 meters. But, since it’s interesting, let’s get into how we deal with bandwidth limits anyway. In the land of fiber, there are two basic kinds of fiber optic cabling. Single-mode fiber, and multi-mode fiber. Now, mode here doesn’t mean a method of operation. Here it means the field pattern of propagating electromagnetic waves. Ideally we want the light to travel only in the transverse mode, and that’s what single-mode fiber allows us to do. It accomplishes this by having a very small internal diameter, what we in the business call itty bitty. Generally it’s between 8 and 10 micrometers across. This tiny size of the fiber allows the pulses to remain distinct over longer distances because the light traveling through the fiber mainly stays in the transverse mode. Because of this, long-distance links on the order of thousands of kilometers are usually done with single-mode fiber. But, single-mode fiber is really finicky to deal with, requiring special tools to make connections since it’s so darn small. So for applications involving shorter fiber runs, like networking a building, we’ll use much easier to deal with multi-mode fiber. This thicker fiber allows us to make cable terminations more easily at the cost of a messier signal on the other end. Still, it’s a fair bit of bandwidth. Using just LEDs, gigabit speeds are easily achievable. And if we get into higher-grade fibers and start using lasers as transmitters, we can get 100 gigabit speeds over distances on the order of 100 meters. And remember, the shorter the run, the easier it is to achieve high bandwidth. But if we’re talking about a fiber like TOSLINK, well that’s nothing like even multi-mode fiber. It’s actually in a third category. Generally TOSLINK is a plastic optical fiber. It’s much thicker inside, about a hundred times thicker than single mode fiber, so it exhibits much greater modal dispersion, and thus its bandwidth limit is much lower. But how much lower is it, really? I mean, shorter lengths make the bandwidth go up, so even though that fishing line in there has wicked bad modal dispersion, over just a few meters it shouldn’t matter much, right? Right! In a 2009 paper by Yasuhiro Koike, the possibility of using plastic optical fiber for high speed networking was explored. By using different modulation methods, it was found that plastic fiber could easily achieve gigabit speed at lengths up to 100 meters. And, with the development of graded-index plastic fiber, 40 gigabit speeds were achieved. Pretty impressive. But, now we’re stepping into messy territory. Let’s rewind a bit. Graded-index plastic optical fiber is a new development. And the question I’m getting at here is why haven’t we been using fiber forever? Imagine that in 1985 we had come up with one standard cable, like a bidirectional TOSLINK cable with a pair of power wires running through it. I’ll call it UniLINK. Could we have been simply been using the same cable to replace the functions of all these, and had a future-proof design because the speed could simply be boosted with each new generation of hardware? Well, maybe. A TOSLINK cable with a 10 meter length could perhaps pull off 10 gigabit speeds. And so, if we had designed a cable like my theoretical UniLINK cable, then perhaps we could have simply had one cable to rule them all. Oh, and wouldn’t ya know it, I found this product guide from Toshiba and it turns out that TOSLINK did have a few bidirectional connectors out there. They are generally limited to professional and niche applications like automation control, but this high-speed TOSLINK connection is capable of a quarter gigabit at 20 meters. Not too bad, and I don’t doubt that could be improved. But, well, now here’s where the heavy weight of reality steps in. As the old adage goes, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It may seem silly to use such complicated cables when commercial fiber optic links are now pushing past terabit speeds, but just looking at the various connectors and cables we’ve used through the ages doesn’t really explain what they’re doing. An HDMI cable doesn’t have 19 conductors running through it for grins and giggles. Most handle the video data in various ways, but others handle things like the audio return channel (and notably that pin was unused in early versions of the standard), the display data channel which allows displays and whatever they’re plugged into to get a nice introduction and learn their respective preferences (also this is where HDCP runs along for the ride), a 5v power supply, the consumer electronics control which is what allows other devices to turn on and off your TV for you, and many of these pins have been given more and more tasks as HDMI has matured and improved. Could we do all of that with one single fiber optic cable? Perhaps. Though HDMI 2.1 has a total bandwidth of 48 gigabits per second, which might not be possible with plastic fiber at all. Or at least, only over relatively short distances. See, it’s interesting to think about the blazing fast speeds fiber optics allow, but a super fast serial datastream isn’t necessarily useful for driving the pixels of an LCD panel in a logical fashion. And therein lies the problem. We have a bunch of different cables to deal with because they’re all designed to do specific things in specific ways. The end! ♫ unexpectedly smooth jazz ♫ Just kidding! Though, that pretty much is the answer. At a very fundamental level, they’re all carrying power and data. But how that data should best be transported depends on what kind of data it is and what we want to do with it. As new standards came up, their cables were designed to address those needs. And oftentimes the best way to take care of a specific need is to add another conductor for doing just one thing. So, while we could just send everything over a high-speed fiber connection, the extra processing that might be required on each end can make the whole idea more complicated, and expensive. And so, new cables for new applications often make the most sense. If you can simplify the data processing with a more complicated cable, it’s often worth it. And now, I’m about to shoot that argument in the foot. Did you know that there are HDMI cables which are actually fiber-optic? If you need to run an HDMI cable over a very long distance, one of the easiest ways to do it is to take an HDMI signal, convert it to a fiber optic data stream, send it over a fiber however long you need, and convert it back to HDMI on the other end. Commercially available products can do all that in what looks like any ordinary HDMI cable that just happens to be very long. These cables actually cheat a little bit and have four fibers going through them, probably one for each of the three sets of data lines and the fourth for the clock signal that a normal HDMI cable carries, to make encoding and decoding easier, but they demonstrate that the actual hardware required to convert to fiber and back again isn’t that complex. It all fits inside these connectors. Back in 2014, LinusTechTips demonstrated a USB 3.Optical cable from Corning that, well did the same thing but for USB. The tech to convert to optical and back was a little more expensive at the time, but it still all fit in modules barely larger than your basic flash drive. So, what’s the deal then? What exactly is stopping us from using a UniLINK hybrid power and optical cable for everything? Um, nothing. Except of course for all the other cables we already have. This is why I love looking at technology through a historical lens. TOSLINK is surprisingly old for what it is, but at the same time it’s kinda in its own little corner. Consumers haven’t needed fiber optics for bandwidth reasons until very recently, so unless there was some reason electrical isolation was absolutely necessary, using a pair of copper wires was sufficient. So, throughout the rise of the digital age, we just kept on going with copper. Because it worked. Lots of technological progress comes from using existing things in new ways. Just look at how we first got the Internet into our homes--using ordinary telephone lines! [dial-up modem sounds] Just by calling a specific phone number and having your computer screech at another one, you’re online! And then, we adapted those phone lines into basic broadband using DSL, and if you’ve got cable Internet, you’re getting your memes over the same coaxial cable that’s been delivering ...must-watch television programming for decades. And it works! Backward compatibility is also partly to blame for keeping optical tech in the dark. Like in the case of USB, more data lines were added to the existing connector, rather than create an entirely new one. It was another case of using existing things in new ways, though with a little more flair. The only practical time to introduce an optical standard is when creating an entirely new standard. Speaking of creating entirely new standards, Thunderbolt was almost optical. In fact, it was originally called Light Peak. But somewhere in the development process, Intel realized they’d like to be able to send power through these cables, and while they pondered stealing my idea and bundling copper wire with optical fibers, by 2011 they gave up the fiber thing altogether, realizing that copper worked just fine. Though, it’s worth noting that in the development stages, they were pushing 10 gigabits a second through plastic fiber, and believed they could get to 100. Also of note is that, just like Corning’s extra long optical USB cable, optical Thunderbolt cables were a thing, but this hasn’t yet become a reality for Thunderbolt 3. Speaking of Thunderbolt 3, we do seem to be headed towards a One Cable to Rule Them All future. Or at least, maybe. USB type C can do nearly everything we might want a cable to do, and it can do it pretty well. Nevermind how incredibly confusing the whole situation is right now because the connector is called USB type C but that doesn’t actually mean anything in regards to what data can go through that port or any specific cable because the USB Implementers Forum sucks at branding and bundling Thunderbolt into the same thing as USB is making this mighty confusing. Get it together, people! So where does this leave us? To put it simply, it’s complicated. We do sort of see fiber optics in the consumer space. Though most of those implementations are indirect and just a way of getting around cable length limits. It doesn’t seem likely that we’d end up with a TOSLINK-like cable that sends only optical data, because we need copper to send power, anyway. And if we need some copper, why not just do it all with copper? I imagine that’s the conclusion Intel came to in the development of Thunderbolt. Will another attempt at creating a truly optical standard find success? Well, I’m doubtful. Thunderbolt 3 and/or USB 3.2 or wherever we are in this situation is probably way faster than what any casual consumer is gonna need for a while. I won’t say ever, cause you just can’t do that when it comes to tech, but then there’s this other elephant in the room I haven’t mentioned yet; WiFi. [in a Valley Girl voice] Wires are sooo yesssterday. Why use a wire when I could live life untethered? Ugh, so gross these wires. I hate to break it to you, but your average consumer is not your average enthusiast, and so if there’s a wireless option, that’s probably preferred. Why do you think headphone jacks are going away? I mean, I was mad at OnePlus for ditching it but today I rarely miss it. So yeah. There will always be a need for super-fast wired connections in the professional space, and lots of you enthusiasts out there love to live in that same tier. But let’s be honest. You’re not the average user. That’s not a bad thing, not at all! But it deserves to be said. For now, I imagine optical connectors will stay right where they are. Simultaneously at the very bottom with TOSLINK, and at the very top with crazy fast networking equipment. For everything else, copper’s pretty OK. And for everything else else, microwaves are fine, too. And for those weird niche cases where we are running fiber as a Frankenstein solution to getting around a length limitation, well to that I say, why not? Thanks for watching. There’s a lot I didn’t get to before ending this video, so as these fine Patreon supporters start scrolling up your screen, I’ll bring a few of them up. When we make long-distance fiber optic links, we usually can’t send light all the way from one end to the other because even the best optical fibers do attenuate the signal somewhat. In the past, we used electronic repeaters which simply read the incoming signal and repeated it using another laser to enable longer connections. However, these days we use optical amplifiers which use some physics magic to passively make the light beam more intense without actually creating a new beam of light. Because you don’t need a bunch of active devices repeating the signal along the fiber’s length, you can speed up data transmission within it. I don’t understand the operating principle of optical amplifiers well enough to provide a good explanation of how they work, so if anyone in the comments wants to take a crack at it please do. Also, I do want to point out a valid criticism from the last video. HDMI sure does have more audio bandwidth than TOSLINK, but what if you only want to send audio? Since HDMI is primarily a video interface, audio-only just isn’t a thing it does. And, that’s a fair point. However, when we’re dealing with multichannel high-resolution audio, I think it’s fair to say that we’re usually talking about the home theater space, and that’s why I was ignoring that potential use case. Also! The Audio Return Channel was until HDMI 2.1 limited to S/PDIF, meaning until very recently TOSLINK and the ARC were essentially the same thing, and since many people reported having issues with the ARC, TOSLINK provided an alternative with just-as-good audio and with better compatibility. Now, though, the ARC is truly better, so assuming you don’t run into problems, it leaves TOSLINK in the dust. Another fun little thing was that I did run across some research looking into how to send electrical power over optical fiber. Yep, power over optical fiber is a thing, but I can’t seem to find any specifications on exactly how much power can be sent. And I doubt it’s very much at all, though I’m willing to be surprised. And lastly, following along those lines, one of the things that CAT5 cabling lets us do is send power in addition to data over the same lines. This is called Power over Ethernet, and … wait. It’s called power over ethernet, eh? Hmm. How interesting. Anyway, power over Ethernet allows for things like powering wireless access points without needing an A/C power source at the location, providing power to IP phones in office buildings, or any other such need. And up to 50 watts! That’s some powerful stuff, that Ethernet is. ♫ abridgedly smooth jazz ♫
Info
Channel: Technology Connections
Views: 1,254,158
Rating: 4.9276156 out of 5
Keywords: fiber optics, toslink, technology connections, s/pdif, spdif, optical audio, ethernet, internet, fiber line, fiber to the x, optical interconnects
Id: CwZdur1Pi3M
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)
Published: Mon Jul 29 2019
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