Fiber Optic Internet

Some of the fiber optic internet networks that worth to highlight is the Austrian fiber optic network  which is one of the best in the world. The technology has developed rapidly. In the early days of the Internet, the signals were transmitted using analogue telephone lines and telephone modems. The first devices of this kind had to be connected by telephone receiver to the server. This was followed by modems  and routers with the built-in acoustic unit, which could perform this process independently. The maximum download rate was 56 kbit / s. This was mainly limited by the analogue copper line, in practice, the speeds were between 30 and 40 kbit / s. By connecting to ISDN lines could reach up to 64 kbit / s in the downstream.

In the late 1980s, new transmission methods were developed, especially DSL, Digital Subscriber Line. It was developed separately and differently in America and Europe. This created two different standards. ANSI for the American and ETSI for the European market. The maximum download rate at this time was about 1.5 to 2 Mbps. At this time, the Internet use of private households increased rapidly.

The next advancement in Internet operation was ADSL, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. This primarily characterizes the different speeds up / download rate. In total, you could achieve higher download rates. The connection was still made via the copper line network, which is also used for telephony. The maximum download rate is up to 16 Mbit / s with ADSL, technically up to 25 Mbit / s are possible on short sections.

The birth of the fiber optic Internet

From this point on, people began to study the technology of fiber optic transmission or fiber optics. The standardized technology behind it is called VDSL (Very High-Speed ​​Digital Subscriber Line). In essence, the largest copper wires in the center of the network were exchanged for fiber optic cables. The remaining connection is still via copper lines. At the moment we are still in this area. With each section of copper cable that is exchanged for the fiber optic network, the speed increases slightly. At present, 100 Mbit / s are available in the downstream for a relatively wide area, and in some urban areas even up to 250 Mbit / s.

The largest fiber-optic Internet currently operates the A1 Telekom, here there are tariffs of up to 100 Mbit / s and Download Flat Rate. Even some FTTH connections in Vienna have already been realized. The expansion will take up a lot of time on a large scale.

How does the fiber optic cable technology work?

In the usual copper cable technology, the signals were transmitted by means of current pulses. In special cases, even telephones could be supplied with emergency power. However, these cables are exposed to a certain ageing process, a defective cable can, therefore, lead to significant signal loss. In the case of glass fiber, however, the signals are transmitted purely via light signals and without power. This increases the speed and reduces the susceptibility to errors.

With fiber optic connectivity theoretically up to 1 Gbit / s in the downstream possible, so 1000 Mbit / s!

Difference bit and byte

To better estimate how fast, for example, 100 Mbps, it helps to know the difference between bit and byte.

The smallest unit in computer science is a bit. One bit is the famous “ones and zeros” that is spoken about so often. A bit can only have the value 0 or 1. This will send all the information.

At some point, however, they went over to a larger format. Therefore, one has summarized 8 bits to a byte.

So:

8 bits = 1 byte
A picture of 5 MB data volume consists of 41,943,040 bits.

Over time, it has become common to call data volumes byte and data rates bits.

To return to our initial example:

100 Mbps means 12.5 MB / s download. A video with 500 MB would be in just 40 seconds on your hard drive.