Lesson
1: Introduction To Broadband
Objectives: From this
lesson you should learn:
- What is “Broadband” and why fiber optics makes broadband possible
-
The advantages of optical fiber as a communications medium
-
How optical fiber is used in communications systems
Introduction
Today,
the term “broadband” has become synonymous with high speed Internet,
but few know that the term comes from the technology behind our first
high-speed, always-on Internet.
By the mid-1990s, the Internet had become a topic of discussion
everywhere. “The Information Superhighway” had caught the public’s
interest. The problem was the information superhighway was actually an
old dirt road made for horse and buggy travel. People connected to the
Internet on aging copper phone lines with dial up modems that operated
at slow speeds, first only 300 bits per second then developing up to a
maximum 56 kilobits per second. It was OK for email but much too slow
for the brand new graphic interface of the World Wide Web.
Everything changed overnight. In February of 1997 in a suburb of Boston,
Continental Cablevision, a CATV company, began installing a small
device that looked like a cable box to customer's CATV cable and the
Ethernet port on their computer, loaded some software on my computer and
logged them in. At that moment, They became one of the first customers
to have “broadband”. When they tested the connection speed it registered
around 4 megabits/second for downloads and 1 megabits/second for
uploads. Always on and ready for use. All for $40 per month.
Revolutionary!
In this lesson you will lean more about how
broadband got started and revolutionized the communications industry
Student Assignment:
Read either of the references and take the
quiz.
Online FOA Reference:
Introduction To Broadband
Book Chapter:
The Fiber Optic Association Guide To Broadband, Chapter 1
(Print Version)
YouTube Videos
FOA
Lecture 1: Fiber Optics & Communications
Test Your Knowledge:
- Next: Lesson
2: Fiber Optic Jargon - The Language of Broadband
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