Let me introduce you to Fiber Optic :
Have you ever thought about how you get emails or any other information from any corner of the world within a blink of an eye this has been made possible by a network of cables which are laid under the ground and below the ocean, the cables which carry most of the world's data are optical fiber cables they are also used in medical equipment lets learn how optical fiber cables work and how they have revolutionized the world around us
Optical fiber cable is made up of thousands of fiber strands and a single fiber strand is as thin as a human hair,optical fiber carry information in the form of light let’s first learn some fundamental behaviors of light to understand the working of optical fibers the speed of light changes when it passes through a medium glass and this changes in speed is expressed by the refractive index
Refractive index(n)=speed of light in vacuum/speed of light in a medium
This variation in the speed of the light leads to another interesting phenomenon refraction to understand what it is let us carry out
refraction occurs when light passes from a medium with one refractive index to one with another refractive index the light bends towards the interface when it goes from a medium of high to one of the low refractive indices refractive is the reason why a pencil looks bent in a glass of water this simple refractive technique is effectively used in optical fibers
Now lets go back to our main topic how does the optical fibre transmit information such as a phone call or internet signals any information can be represented in the form of zeros and ones assume you want to send a hello text mgs through your mobile first this word will be converted into an equivalent binary code as a sequence of zeros and ones after the conversion your mobile phone will transmit these zeros and ones in the form of electromagnetic waves one is transmitted as a high frequency and zero as low frequency wave your local cell tower picks up these electromagnetic waves at the tower if the electromagnetic wave is of high frequency a light pulse is generated otherwise no pulse is generated now these light pulses can easily be transmitted through optical fibre cables the light pulses which carry the information have to travel through a complicated network of cables to reach their destination for this purpose the entire globe is covered with optical fiber cables these cables are laid under the ground and below the ocean it is mainly the mobile service providers that maintain these underground cables AT&T,Orange and Verizon are some of the few global players who own and maintain the submarine cable network a detailed cross section view of an undersea cable is seen below
You can notice that only a small portion of the cable is used for holding the optical fiber the remaining area of the cable is a mechanical structure for protection and strength now the question is where does the amplifier get power from under these deep oceans???
Well for this a thin a copper shell is used inside the cable which carries electric power along the cable so that the amplifiers can be powered
this whole explanation simply means that if optical fiber cables do not reach a part of the globe that part will be isolated from the internet or mobile communications if we compare optical fiber cable to a traditional copper cable the OP coal fiber cable a superior in almost every way fiber optic cables provide larger bandwidth and transmit
data at much higher speeds than copper cables this is because the speed of light is always greater than the speed of electrons the flow of electrons in a copper cable generates a magnetic field even outside of the cable that can cause electromagnetic interference, on the other hand, the light which travels through the optical cable is always confined within the fiber thus the chance of interaction with an external signal does not exist one more interesting feature about optical fiber cables is that any light signal which enters from the side has a minimal chance of traveling along the cable thus the optical fiber cables provide a high data security you might be amazed to know that optical fiber was first used in endoscopy even before it was used in the telecommunications field
In telecommunications digital pulse are transferred through the optical fiber cable, however, in endoscopic cables, visual signals which are in the analog form are transmitted to the other end.
