Unit 3 Optical Fibres

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 815.

engineer: There's no doubt optical fibre systems have enormous advantages over existing transmission systems.

JOURNALIST: So we have heard. But what are these advantages?

ENGINEER: Well, first and foremost, they have a much higher capacity than copper wires. In other words, they can carry much more information — telephone calls or data, it doesn't matter which.

Secondly, they have a potentially lower material cost. At the moment, production costs of optical fibre are relatively high, but this is only because mass production hasn't really started. In the long term, optical fibre will cost much less to produce than conventional cables. Um, . . another big advantage is their size they take up much less space. With conventional cable you need many more ducts or pipes to carry the cable.

JOURNALIST: What about quality of transmission?

ENGINEER: Yes, they score very highly here as well. The signal doesn't need to be amplified as often as with conventional cable, where signal loss means you need far more repeaters or boosters — in fact, every 2 or 3 kilometres as opposed to every 20 kilometres.

Also, as far as quality is concerned, optical fibres don't suffer from interference or

crosstalk as much as conventional cable.

JOURNALIST: Anything else?

ENGINEER: Yes, they also have complete electrical isolation and therefore there 's much more security on the line — the data can't be corrupted or interfered with.