cable dsl fiber optic

erika g

Member
Between cable, dsl, and fiber optic internet, why is fiber optic the best as far as residential services go? Will there be something even better than fiber optic internet in the distant future? I know cable and dsl are good but fiber optic is even better than both of these two. will something in the distant future beat out fiber optic internet? i want your opinion you guys. rsvp.
 
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beers

Moderator
Staff member
I know cable and dsl are good but fiber optic is even better than both of these two
If you already have a preconceived notion of it being better, what quantifies that statement?

Personally, you're using a different type of medium (light in fiber vs electricity through copper). You also see the biggest gains for internet communication as cable and DSL were designed to leverage existing infrastructure to provide data services, where TV and analog telephones were already installed. The solutions designed for those services didn't have the same demands as far as scale and volume of data.

IMO, you have exponentially the biggest way to expand your infrastructure as technology advances as fiber is simply a medium. You can swap the optics on both ends of the fiber, or even overlay different wavelengths of light down the same fiber and facilitate an instant multiplicative increase in capacity, without installing any other physical infrastructure like additional cabling.

Fiber isn't anything new but implementations like GPON and FTTH have popularized it to a large degree, in addition to advancing standards. FDDI was a thing in the late 80s with 100 Mbit over fiber ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_Distributed_Data_Interface

I don't think you'll see anything faster unless either we discover some physics sorcery to increase the speed of light or like quantum tunneling shenanigans.
 
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