Gadgetory

it's the ultimate battle of the networking communications cables copper versus fiber which will win the ultimate bandwidth challenge and send his opponents ping crying home to mama let's begin with the key characteristics those good old reliable copper phone lines that's right the same basic infrastructure that we've been using since the beginning of the 20th century copper is highly conductive this is what makes it so great for carrying the power to your home that you need to do all the things that are important that you need to do there and copper wires use the movement of electrons to carry signals by modulating a waveform at one end then demodulating it at the other end to convert the patterns in the waveform into an analog or a digital signal a device that modulates and demodulates is called a modem the problem is that copper even higher bandwidth coaxial cables can carry only a small number of waveforms limiting its maximum data capacity and these waveforms degrade very quickly as the distance between the communications devices increases in fact copper only has two main advantages today one it's much less expensive per unit distance than fiber and two hits already deployed basically everywhere thanks telephone in television modern fiber optic cable invented by Corning Inc in the 70s changed the game completely by allowing the use of light bursts to carry a signal instead of waves traveling through metal today these cables are made up of a highly transparent flexible glass core wrapped in a series of layers that protect both the integrity of the signal in the glass and the structure of the glass inside from the elements because this is light traveling through a nearly transparent medium it moves at approximately 200,000 kilometers per second actually not that different from an electrical signal through copper but but much more importantly the integrity of the signal the ease with which we can interpret the light on vs. light off at either end is much easier to maintain at higher switching speeds and over longer distances I mean we're talking thousands of kilometers like across oceans giving fiber-optic cables and enormous advantage in speed and well distance there's lots of other cool stuff too optical signals are immune to electromagnetic interference individual fibers can be bundled together during installation some for use now others dark for expandability in the future depending on the requirements fiber can be used with LEDs or lasers and an individual fiber might transmit multiple wavelengths or colors of light at the same time to be split out at the other end to further increase capacity sounds great let's use it for everything Linus well life is rarely that simple isn't it we're heading in that direction but currently fiber is so much more expensive per length than copper that it's taking a little while to get there the good news is that copper carries some additional hidden costs that increase fibers appeal even further thicker heavier cables are more difficult to install and may require more clearance than is even available in existing underground pathways in cases where multiple connections can leverage a single backbone the cost per capacity argument comes into play where even if two fibers cost a thousand times what copper would if it can carry over a thousand times the data the cost per customer and ISP can serve goes down and of course the distance thing comes into play again the ISP will save again on repeaters that you'll need all over the neighborhood to maintain the integrity of a signal that's running on copper lines so mrs. Rochester's connection doesn't drop out in the middle of her Netflix marathon but that doesn't mean that every house will be getting a direct fiber connection anytime soon it would certainly be nice but hybrid deployments with a fiber backbone that serves many customers and copper runs to individuals for the last mile are most common today because they deliver solid speeds and reliability while saving a lot of money for the Tauri ously tight-fisted ISPs that are managing the infrastructure speaking of whatever it is I was just talking about our sponsor today is fractal design and instead of me telling you guys about their simple Scandinavian design and great power supply's cases and cooling products we actually weren't sure what to do this time so I was like spitballing ideas and like what can we get at a dollar store like glitter NYX like yeah sure so he goes to a dollar store and comes back with a tube of glitter glue not only that a tube of glitter glue that's actually completely hardened and dried out so the only thing we ended up being able to do with it at all was make me pretty for you guys so I hope you enjoyed it y'all you viewers and you Josh do you find me pretty and sparkly my sparkling excellent time sparkling alright so thanks again to fractal design for sponsoring today's episode of fast as possible thanks to you guys for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible episodes just like this one and Nick that's for you buddy don't forget to subscribe