Fiber-optic broadband has long been touted as the future of the telecoms industry and once you learn a few key facts it is not difficult to understand its importance. Fiber is also spelled a Fibre. While many people are obsessed with wireless internet access, fiber optic may get slightly overlooked. However, as connection-speed requirements are increasing month by month, so too will the significant of fiber-optic broadband.
Fiber-optic broadband should be your fixed-line connection of choice because it has major benefits when compared with the ADSL broadband delivered by traditional copper wiring. Any ADSL customer will know that the download and upload speeds advertised by an internet service provider (ISP) have to be taken with a liberal pinch of salt. This is because they are usually rated at their theoretical maximums and not their real-world performance. The reason for this is that the nature of the telephone wiring means that signals become degraded over long distances and so speeds drop in tandem.
Fiber broadband does not suffer from the same issues. The location of your property will have less of an impact on the speed which you receive. This results in greater consistency and because the cables are buried underground, not suspended in the air, there is less chance of them being damaged by weather conditions or other elements outside of your control. Fiber broadband is the right choice if you want a connection that will be reliable as well as fast.
The raw figures tell the story: there are already fibre-optic connections offering more than 100Mbps download speeds in many areas. In the future this will increase further until 1Gbps services are not uncommon. Of course, wireless internet speeds over Wi-Fi will need to keep up with this pace if the devices and computers are going to be able to take full advantage of fiber-optic broadband. Meanwhile, fiber speeds will outdo those attainable over wide-area mobile networks, even those using 4G technologies. This is because of the fact that the user is in motion and that the signal still has to travel through the air and navigate buildings and the local topography to provide data connectivity.
Now that you can appreciate the supremacy of fibre-optic broadband when compared with other options, it is necessary to think about why you might actually need all of this extra speed. Firstly, the increasing prevalence of on-demand video services, from which you can stream movies and TV shows in high definition, means that connections are becoming more data intensive. In addition, multi-user homes now contain a number of different devices all sharing the same connection simultaneously. You might be streaming a film and using your smart phone to send an email downstairs, while someone is playing an online game upstairs. Without a fiber-optic connection, this might put a strain on your broadband and can end up making all but the simplest of tasks difficult to achieve.
The one thing which fiber-optic broadband needs to rule the telecom world of the future is investment. If you live in a heavily populated area, then it seems certain that you will eventually have fibre-optic access because it makes financial sense for the broadband providers to tap into large new markets. However, isolated locations which could benefit the most from fiber broadband will be more difficult to connect because of the very high installation costs.
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