it's the ultimate battle of the networking Communications cables copper
versus fiber which will win the ultimate bandwidth Challenge and send his
opponent's ping crying home to Mama let's begin with the key characteristics
of those Good Old Reliable copper foam 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 de modulates
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 it's already deployed basically everywhere
thanks telephone and 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
km/ second actually not that different from an electrical signal through copper
um but but much more importantly the Integrity of the signal the ease with
which we can interpret the light on versus 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 an 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 split out at the
other end to further increase capacity sounds great let's use it for everything
lonus 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 in 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 notoriously tightfisted 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 supplies cases and cooling products um
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 and Nick's 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 all you viewers and you Josh
do you find me pretty and sparkly am I
sparkling excellent I'm sparkling all right so thanks again to fractal design
for sponsoring today's episode as 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 fastest Possible episodes just like this one and Nick that's for
you buddy don't forget to subscribe