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The (OC-1) – Optical Carrier 1 – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

When you next watch cable TV or switch on your high-speed internet, or speak to someone on the phone from the other side of the globe, spare a thought for two 19th Century Frenchmen, who, armed with a tinkling stream of water and a waterproof lamp, made a little experiment. They noticed that, if the lamp’s beam was shone into the mouth of the stream, the light carried all the way down to the splashing below. And so the optical carrier, or (OC-1) – Optical Carrier 1, was born.

Over a century later, the same principle that saw the light bounce around inside the column of water now sees our planet is criss-crossed with a bewildering array of cables – optical fibers. The Parisians had documented the principle of Total Internal Reflection, and this concept, with very little change, is what is used in our optical fiber network today.

Optic fiber is the most common form of optical carrier in the world. To explain how it works, imagine, when you were a kid, sending flashlight messages to your pal down the alleyway. You – the transmitter – have no problem sending your secret messages to your pal – the receiver. But what if the alleyway – the carrier – has a corner in it? No more secret messages. Now coat the walls with mirrors all along both sides. The flashlight messages bounce along both sides and your pal is back on line.

In today’s telecommunications, the flashlight is provided by high-quality lasers, the receiver is a photo-electric cell that then converts the light pulse to an electrical one, and the carrier is the fiber. However, the French scientist’s principle of ensuring that the angle that the light is shone in is greater than 38 degrees (in the case of glass), is still used today.

These fibers are made of very high quality glass, with an absolute minimum of impurity in the material. These thin filaments are then coated with a metallic coating that further helps the internal reflection concept. These are then coated with a buffer to protect it from the environment. Now these are then packaged up with hundreds or even thousands of other filaments to create a thick cable, which is then given a protective plastic coat.

Optical fibers are far more commonly used now than their copper wire ancestors. They are more energy efficient, they lose less energy to their surroundings, they carry more bandwidth for the diameter than copper, and they are less susceptible to interference from the surroundings – like lightning, power cables, and neighboring telecoms cables.

Since the start of the millennium, optical carriers are also far more economical to install and run than copper: optical fibers can go without a signal booster for over 60 miles.

More and more cables are being laid every day, and the technology is growing in leaps and bounds. The bandwidth going into your homes will soon be limitless, and so applications will soon be limited only by your imagination. What would those too tinkering Frenchmen have thought if they could show you their experiment, live from Paris into your living room, by 3d hologram?