BITCOIN FOR AMAZON GIFT CARD

Question:

All providers seem to claim they have fiber networks. What’s different about InfinityLink fiber to the home?

Answer:

Don’t be fooled! It is true that most cable and FTTN (DSL) networks use fiber. In these networks, the fiber carries the signal close enough to homes so that copper can carry it the rest of the way. However, this approach requires expensive, difficult-to-maintain electronics at the point where fiber meets copper. (These electronic devices use a great deal of power and are quite sensitive to lightning strikes. Even the cost of bringing electric power to them can be huge, depending on where they are located.) The available bandwidth is far less than in an all-fiber network. And most of these halfway approaches do not allow symmetrical bandwidth – cable and DSL systems generally can’t upload information as fast as they can download it.

Question:

With DSL, there’s often a gap between advertised and actual bandwidth. Is that true for fiber?

Answer:

No. DSL and even wireless networks are usually heavily oversubscribed – that is, providers promise users more than the total amount of available bandwidth because they know all users aren’t going full throttle most of the time. As a result, networks slow down during periods of heavy use, such as when teenagers come home from school. Copper networks are also more subject to speed degradation due to the condition of the wiring. Fiber has enough bandwidth and reliability that providers can guarantee high speeds with little or no oversubscription. If a fiber network is designed properly, users will always get the speeds that are advertised – or better. Data published by the FCC in June 2014 showed that, on average, fiber-to-the-home services delivered 113 percent of their advertised speeds.

Question:

What about wireless? I hear there’s a wireless carrier boasting 300 Mbps!

Answer:

That’s the potential bandwidth shared by all users connected to a cellular antenna. A wireless user might get high speeds for a moment or two if no one else is around, but average wireless speeds, even for 4G, are similar to those for DSL. Wireless broadband depends on fiber to move information to and from cell towers. Even so, each antenna can support only a finite number of cellular signals. Cellular data traffic grew 300-fold from 2006 to 2013 and will grow another sixfold by 2021. Providers severely limit wireless data, encouraging or forcing customers to use Wi-Fi connections instead of cellular networks for data. Those Wi-Fi connections, in turn, work best when they can quickly offload data to a fiber network. A typical cellular data plan allows 3 or 4 gigabytes per month. Use your phone to view video, and you quickly run over the limit.

Question:

What exactly makes fiber "future proof"?

Answer:

The equipment used to send light signals over optical fiber keeps getting better. So equipping an existing fiber network with new electronics and with lasers that pulse light faster, or lasers that use different wavelengths of light, can vastly increase available bandwidth without changing the fiber itself. New electronics are very cheap compared with the original cost of laying the fiber. At the customer end, the system can be designed so that customers themselves can simply pull an old unit out and plug a new one in. Therefore, once fiber has been deployed, network operators can keep increasing bandwidth as needed at very little cost.

Question:

How long has fiber optic technology been in use?

Answer

Fiber optic cable is the foundation of the world’s telecommunications system. It has been used for more than 30 years to carry communications traffic from city to city and from country to country. Almost every country has some fiber optic cable, delivering services reliably and inexpensively.