How to connect the Internet via fiber optic. What is fiber optics and how does it work. Fiber optic cable - a unique high-tech product

At the moment, fiber optic cable is the most fast way internet connections in the world. The high speed of the network is provided by transmitting data using light. In fact, the cable consists of many individual wires through which light pulses pass. Such cables are capable of simultaneously transmitting data from several objects, without any loss of information or speed. Using this feature, providers often combine cable TV, telephony and Internet services in one cable, which can significantly reduce costs. Optical fiber is the technology of the future.

In this article, we will look at how much it costs to run fiber optics to a private house and how to do it.

Advantages of fiber

• durability;
• high throughput;
• safety, this species communication allows you to quickly identify third-party interference;
• versatility.

Optical fiber Rostelecom to a private house - how to connect?

Previously, this type of communication was available only in an apartment, but now it is possible to run a fiber optic cable to a private house. Similar services are provided by Rostelecom. To activate this service, simply leave a request at the office of the company or on the website rostelecom.ru.

Optical fiber Rostelecom in a private house - short instruction, how to connect:

1. Go to the company's website rostelecom.ru.
2. Select your region.
3. Go to the "For yourself" section.
4. Go to the "Internet" tab.
5. Select a plan and click connect.
6. Fill out the form and click "Order".

In the absence of Internet access, you can visit the company's office in person and discuss all issues with a specialist.

How much does it cost to run fiber optics from Rostelecom to a private house?

When connecting your home to optics in the private sector, the price will be determined depending on the type of line, footage and tariff. At the moment, the connection is made for only 99 rubles per month.

There are also the following basic tariff plans:

1. 200 Mbps for 890 rubles.
2. 100 Mbps for 690 rubles.
3. 80 Mbps for 590 rubles.
4. 45 Mbps for 480 rubles.

Summarizing

According to user reviews, fiber is an excellent way to connect to the Internet, as it can provide a stable high speed connections. It is checked up personally, on own experience. Now you also know how to install fiber optics in a private house and you can do it at the best prices.

Trading house "OPTEN", being the main partner of many domestic and foreign companies, offers to supply the whole range of products for the construction and operation of fiber-optic communication lines. In particular, a cross rack optical http://td.opten.spb.ru/komm-cross/komm/krossi-sto, necessary for the operation of fiber optic networks.

As you read this, terabytes of data are floating around the world, trapped in strands of glass stretched across the ocean floor. It looks like magic, but it's just advanced technology. Optical fiber is a technology that humanity owes to the naturalists of the 19th century. Observing the rays of light on the surface of the pond, they suggested that the light could be controlled, but it was only recently that they managed to put into practice that brilliant idea with the advent of the most complex factories and a thorough study of the optical properties of materials.

locked light

Twisted-pair copper wire (like your internet cable) has lots of electrons moving around. The current is transmitted through the conductor and carries with it information encoded in a sequence of pulses. Zeros and ones - a binary code that, perhaps, everyone has heard of. The optical conductor of the signal works on the same principle, but from the point of view of physics, everything is much more complicated with it. There could be a half-hour lecture on quantum mechanics, and how many eminent physicists have come to a standstill, trying to understand the nature of light, but we will try to do without lengthy reasoning.

It is enough to keep in mind that, like electrons, photons or light waves (in fact, in our context they are one and the same), can carry encoded information. So, for example, at airfields, in cases of radio communication failure, signals are transmitted to aircraft using directional searchlights. But that is a primitive method, and it only works at a distance of direct visibility. At the same time, light is transmitted by optical fiber for kilometers and far from a straight path.

Mirrors could be used to achieve this effect. Actually, from this test engineers began their experiments. They covered the metal pipes from the inside with a mirror layer and directed a beam of light inside. But not only that, such light guides were prohibitively expensive. The light was repeatedly reflected from their walls and gradually faded, lost its strength and completely disappeared.

The mirrors didn't work. It couldn't be otherwise. Even the most expensive mirror is not perfect. Its reflection coefficient is less than 100%, and after each fall on the mirror surface, the light beam loses some of its energy, and in the closed volume of the fiber, there are an innumerable number of such refractions.

It was then that the time came to recall the pond and those old studies that were based on observing the behavior of light in water. Imagine how a ray of the setting sun falls on the surface of the water, overcomes the boundary and goes down to the bottom of the pond.

Those of the readers who remember the school physics course, probably already guess that the light will change the direction of its movement. Part of the light will pass under the water, slightly changing the angle of its movement, and another insignificant part of the light will be reflected back into the sky, because "the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection." If you observe this phenomenon for a long time, one day you will notice that the light reflected from a mirror under water, at a certain angle, will not be able to break out - it will be completely reflected from the border of water and air, better than from any mirror. The point is not in water as such, but in the combination of two media with different optical properties - unequal refractive indices. To create a light trap, their minimum difference is sufficient.

Flexible light guides

The materials are not that important. Physical experiments for children that demonstrate this effect often use water and a clear plastic tube. More than a couple of meters in such a light guide, the light beam cannot be transmitted, but it looks beautiful. For the same reason, lamps and other decorative items often have plastic light guides in their construction. But when it comes to transmitting information over many kilometers, special, ultra-pure materials are required, with a minimum of impurities and optical properties close to ideal.

In 1934, an American, Norman R. French, patented a glass light guide that was supposed to provide telephone communications, but it did not really work. It took a lot of time to find a material that would meet the highest requirements for purity and transparency, to invent an optical fiber from silicon dioxide - the purest quartz glass. In order to create a difference in refractive indices in transparent silicon, one resorts to a trick. The center of the transparent blank, which will turn into a wire, is left clean, while the outer layers are saturated with germanium - it changes the optical characteristics of the glass.

In this case, the blank is usually sintered from two prefabricated glass tubes inserted one into the other. But you can do the opposite, by saturating the fiberglass core with germanium. More technologically advanced and high-quality fiberglass is obtained when glass tubes are filled with gas from the inside and wait until germanium itself settles on the glass in a thin layer. Then the tube is heated and stretched to a meter length. In this case, the cavity inside closes itself.

The resulting rod has a core with one refractive index and a shell with different optical parameters. It will then serve for the manufacture of optical fiber. So far, a heavy workpiece as thick as a hand does not resemble wire in any way, but quartz glass is well stretched.

The prepared blank is raised to a height of a ten-meter tower, fixed on top and evenly heated until it resembles nougat in consistency. Then, under its own weight, the thinnest thread begins to stretch from the glass blank. On the way down, it cools down and gains flexibility. It may seem strange, but ultra-thin glass bends beautifully.

The finished optical fiber, continuously coming down, is dipped into a bath with liquid plastic, forming a protective layer on the surface of quartz, and then wound up. This continues until the blank at the top of the tower is completely processed into a single thread of a hundred or two kilometers of optical fiber.

From this, in turn, cables will be woven, containing from a couple to a couple of hundred individual glass fibers, reinforcing inserts, shielding layers and protective sheaths.

1. Axial rod.
2. Optical fiber.
3. Plastic protection of optical fibers.
4. Film with hydrophobic gel.
5. Polyethylene shell.
6. Reinforcement.
7. Outer polyethylene sheath.

Connection with the speed of light

The described process is complex, labor-intensive, requires the construction of factories and special training from their personnel, and, nevertheless, the game is worth the candle. After all, the speed of light is an insurmountable limit, the maximum speed with which information can propagate in principle. Only direct optical communication lines can compete with optical fiber in the speed of information transfer, but not copper conductors, no matter what tricks their creators use. Comparisons demonstrate the superiority of optical fiber over other means of information transmission in the best way.

Home Internet in the post-Soviet space, it is often carried out over a twisted-pair cable with conductors one or two millimeters thick. The maximum for it is 100 megabits per second. This is enough for a couple of computers, but when there is a smart TV in the apartment, a NAS that distributes torrents, a home server, several smartphones and smart devices from the world of the Internet of things, an eight-wire wire is not enough. The limitations of the communication channel become apparent. As a rule, in the form of artifacts and stuttering movie characters on the TV screen, or lags in online games. Optical fiber with a thickness of 9 microns has 30 times more bandwidth, not to mention the fact that there can be several such strands in a wire.

At the same time, it is more compact and weighs much less than conventional wires, which is a decisive advantage when laying trunk communication lines and planning urban communications.

Optical cables connect continents, cities and data centers. In Russia, the first such line appeared in Moscow. The first underwater optical cable ran between St. Petersburg and the Danish Aberslund. Then the fiber was stretched between enterprises, government agencies and banks. In large cities, a scheme has become widespread in which optical communication lines are brought to individual apartment buildings, and, nevertheless, for the average consumer, optical fiber is still exotic. We would be interested to know how many of our readers use it at home, because, in most apartments, the good old-fashioned twisted-pair cable still stretches.

Optical fiber is not only expensive and difficult to manufacture. Even more expensive is its qualified service. Here you can not do without blue electrical tape. During installation, quartz fibers must be spliced ​​in a special way, and fiber optic communication lines must be completed with additional equipment.

Despite the fact that the difference in the refractive indices in the core and cladding of the fiber in theory creates an ideal light guide, the light launched through the quartz wire is still attenuated due to impurities contained in the glass. Alas, getting rid of them completely is almost impossible. A dozen water molecules per kilometer of optical fiber is already enough to introduce errors into the signal and reduce the distance over which it can be transmitted.

Electrical engineers face a similar problem with conventional wires. The distance to which you can easily send a signal over the wire they call the regeneration distance.

For a standard telephone cable, it is equal to a kilometer, for a shielded cable - five. The fiber optic core keeps the light at a distance of up to several hundred kilometers, but, in the end, the signal still has to be amplified, regenerated. Relatively cheap and simple amplifiers are installed on classical communication lines. For fiber optics, complex and highly technical units are required that use rare earth metals and infrared lasers.

A small section of specially prepared fiberglass is cut into the communication line. It is additionally saturated with erbium atoms, a rare earth element used, among other things, in the nuclear industry. The erbium atoms in this section of the fiber are in an excited state due to additional pumping by light. Simply put, they are illuminated with a specially tuned laser. The signal passing through such an area of ​​the cable is approximately doubled, since the erbium atoms, in response to exposure, emit light of the same wave as the incoming signal, and therefore retain the information encoded in it. After the amplifier, the optical signal can travel about a hundred kilometers before the procedure needs to be repeated.

Such systems require trained personnel for maintenance and constant supervision, so that the economic benefit of laying individual optical lines for specific subscribers remains doubtful in most countries of the world. And yet, we all use fiberglass to convey messages. Whole modern internet is based on this technology and it is thanks to it that Internet broadcasts in ultra-high resolution, video streaming, Online Games with minimal delay, instant communication with almost anywhere in the world and even Mobile Internet. Yes, base stations cellular communication also binds fiberglass.

Despite the fact that scientists are looking for new ways to build communication networks, we will not get anything more practical for a very long time. Experimental technologies make it possible to increase the information capacity of fiberglass by two or three times, more and more thick stranded glass cables lie on the seabed between continents, however, it is unlikely that it will be possible to overcome the fundamental limitations imposed by the speed of light locked in a quartz vein. The way out seems to be the rejection of quartz and the limitations associated with it, the transmission of information using lasers, but it is possible only in a straight line. Consequently, the transmitters will have to be placed in space, or at least in the upper atmosphere. Similar experiments have attracted attention in recent years. largest corporations, but that's a completely different story.

It was told about the most common types of fiber optic cable used in Ukraine. And today - a cable in a section, and in the course of the story - some practical moments of its installation.

We won't stop at detailed structure all types of cable. Let's take some average typical OK:

1. Central (axial) element.
2. Optical fiber.
3. Plastic modules for optical fibers.
4. Film with hydrophobic gel.
5. Polyethylene shell.
6. Armor.
7. Outer polyethylene sheath.

What does each layer represent when viewed in detail?

Central (axial) element

Fiberglass rod with or without polymer sheath. Main purpose - stiffens the cable. Unsheathed fiberglass rods are bad because they break easily when bent and damage the optical fiber located around them.

optical fiber

Optical fiber strands most often have a thickness of 125 microns (about the size of a hair). They consist of a core (through which, in fact, the signal is transmitted) and a glass shell of a slightly different composition, which ensures complete refraction in the core.

In cable marking, the diameter of the core and sheath is indicated by numbers through a slash. For example: 9/125 - core 9 microns, shell - 125 microns.

The number of fibers in the cable varies from 2 to 144, this is also fixed by a number in the marking.

Based on the thickness of the core, fiber optics are classified into single mode(thin core) and multimode(larger diameter). Recently, multimode has been used less and less, so we will not dwell on it. We only note that it is intended for use over short distances. The sheath of multimode cable and patch cords is usually made orange color(single mode - yellow).

In turn, single-mode optical fiber is:

• Standard (marking SF, SM or SMF);
• Dispersion-shifted ( DS, DSF);
• With non-zero shifted variance ( NZ, NZDSF or NZDS).

AT in general terms- fiber-optic cable with a shifted dispersion (including non-zero) is used for much longer distances than a conventional one.

On top of the shell, the glass threads are varnished, and this microscopic layer also plays an important role. Optical fiber without varnish is damaged, crumbles and breaks at the slightest impact. While in lacquer insulation, it can be twisted and subjected to some stress. In practice, fiber optic strands can withstand the weight of the cable on supports for weeks if all other power rods break during operation.

However, you should not place too high hopes on the strength of the fibers - even varnished, they break easily. Therefore, when installing optical networks, especially when repairing existing highways, extreme accuracy is required.

Plastic modules for optical fibers

These are plastic shells, inside of which there is a bundle of fiber optic filaments and a hydrophobic lubricant. There can be either one such tube with fiber optics in the cable, or several (the latter is more common, especially if there are a lot of fibers). Modules perform the function of protecting fibers from mechanical damage and along the way - their association and marking (if there are several modules in the cable). However, it must be remembered that the plastic module breaks quite easily when bent, and breaks the fibers in it.

There is no single standard for the color marking of modules and fibers, but each manufacturer attaches a passport to the cable drum, in which this is indicated.

Film and polyethylene sheath

These are elements of additional protection of fibers and modules from friction, as well as moisture- some types of optical cable contain a hydrophobe under the film. The top film can be additionally reinforced with interweaving threads and impregnated with a hydrophobic gel.

The plastic shell performs the same functions as the film, plus it serves as a layer between the armor and modules. There are cable modifications where it is not available at all.

Armor

This can be either Kevlar armor (woven threads), or a ring of steel wires, or a sheet of corrugated steel:

• Kevlar used in those types of fiber optic cable where the metal content is unacceptable or if you need to reduce its weight.
• Steel wire armored cable designed for underground laying directly into the ground - strong armor protects against many damages, incl. from a shovel.
• Cable with corrugated armor laid in pipes or cable ducts, such armor can only protect against rodents.

Outer polyethylene sheath

The first and practically the most important level of protection. Dense polyethylene is designed to withstand all the loads that fall on the cable, so if it is damaged, the risk of cable damage increases significantly. You need to make sure that the shell:

a) Has not been damaged during installation - otherwise moisture getting inside will increase the losses on the line;

b) Do not touch a tree, wall, corner or edge of a structure, etc. during operation, if there is a risk of friction in this place under wind and other loads.

A time when a simple Internet connection was enough telephone line and modem are long gone, and today high speed connection to the Web is already an urgent need. Let's take a look at the principle of operation and the main device of a fiber optic Internet connection, which is by far the fastest way to transfer data.

At fiber optic connection high connection speed is ensured due to the structure of the cable, consisting of light-transmitting wires coated with a special protective coating. Data is transmitted using a light beam. By the way, in addition to connecting to the Internet, fiber optics can also act as a telephony and television data transmitter, so a router, TV and telephone can be connected to one cable.

The diameter of the fibers that make up the optical cable is very small - it is hundredths of a millimeter. Optical beams pass through them, transmitted for many kilometers.

Advantages of fiber optic internet

Today, fiber optic cable provides the required speed of connection to the Network. It is with the help of this technology that the maximum data transfer rates are ensured. Fiber optics has the following advantages:

• Long service life of communications;
• Excellent bandwidth, thanks to which information is transmitted as quickly as possible;
• Transmission security - unauthorized access attempts will be immediately detected;
• High level of noise immunity;
• Optical cable is great for media transfer;
• Optical fiber has the ability to carry other types of data.

How to connect to the Internet using fiber optics

The user's connection to the Internet using optics has several varieties, which are referred to as "FTTx", depending on how close the cable is laid to the end user:

• FTTH(fiber to the home) - to the apartment;
• FTTB(fiber to the building) - into the building;
• FTTN(fiber to the node) - to the node;
• FTTC(fiber to the curb) - to the microdistrict.

As you guessed, the fastest connection will be FTTH, which provides the widest possible communication channel. From its name the principle is clear - an optical cable goes directly into the apartment. The communications look like this:

Broadband Internet is a common name whole group modern high-speed technologies for accessing the World Wide Web in a constant mode. Data is received and transmitted at the same high speed - up to hundreds of Mbps.

Thanks to broadband Internet, users have access to

digital TV services; IP telephony; the possibility of cloud storage and much more.

Internet service providers offer various types of broadband Internet access. All available varieties can be divided into two large groups:

fixed - based on wired connections; fiber optic - via optical communication lines; mobile - via wireless communication channels.

Broadband leased line

The earliest broadband technologies were based on Internet access via digital leased lines (DSL). Modern methods digital signal processing can significantly increase throughput telephone line, which has made the xDSL family of technologies one of the most widespread in the world.

The symbol "x" is used to designate the whole family of leased line access technologies, which differ in data rate and line multiplexing method. They are designated by separate abbreviations - ADSL, HDSL, RADSL, SHDSL, VDSL.

In general, all xDSL technologies can be divided into two categories:

symmetrical - with the same speed of receiving and transmitting data; asymmetric - with a higher speed of receiving data from the network.

Symmetrical technologies are used most often in the corporate sector, asymmetric - for subscriber access.

High-speed fiber optic access channels to the Network

Access to the Internet via an optical line is the most common and fastest option for broadband access, widely used in multi-apartment city buildings. Each entrance of the house is connected via an optical fiber switch to the provider, and a twisted pair cable is pulled to the end subscribers for connection to a router or directly to the computer's network card. In this case, the speed of access to the global network will not exceed 100 Mbps.

The highest speed connection is achieved when the subscriber is also connected via a fiber optic cable, and not the usual copper twisted pair. Access via fiber allows you to provide a connection speed of up to 1 Gb / s, which allows you to connect any type of service - Internet, digital TV, IP-telephony.

Mobile broadband

Broadband Internet access via mobile networks of 3G and 4G mobile operators is a popular service due to the large coverage area and the explosive spread of mobile gadgets.

3G technology is already obsolete today, but it is used quite widely, since it is available on a significant part of the coverage of leading operators. To replace 3G, 4G technology is being actively introduced, which allows developing a much higher speed. In metropolitan areas and large cities, providers are also developing the provision of Internet connections via WiMax, since most gadgets come with an already integrated WiFi module.