Fibre Optic Network

During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, the one thing that connected us virtually was high-speed internet connections through the fibre optic network.

Optical fibres – They are thin cylindrical strands of glass whose diameter is close to the diameter of a human hair.
They are surrounded by protectives to make them strong, light, and flexible and thus durable.
It can carry information like text, images, voices, telephone calls across large distances almost at the speed of light.
Working – A beam of light falling on a glass surface passes through partially while the rest is reflected away.
When it passes through, its path bends because the refractive index of glass is different from that of air.
When the beam travels from glass to air medium, it will be completely reflected back within the glass and this is called as total internal reflection.
This is how signals encoded as electromagnetic waves can be fed into one end of an optical fibre.

Refractive index is a measure of the bending of a ray of light when passing from one medium into another that determines how fast light can travel in it.

Total internal reflection is the basis of guiding light across long distances without a significant loss of optical power.

3 parts of a fibre optic communication system
- Transmitter – It encodes information into optical signals (A form of rapidly blinking light pulses of 0’s and 1’s).
- Optical fibre – It carries the signal to its destination.
- Receiver – It is placed at destination which reproduces the information from the encoded signal.

Advantages

- Optical waves allow a high data-transmission rate, up to several terabits per second in a single fibre.
- They are insensitive to external perturbations like lightning and bad weather.
- They are ideal to be buried underground, drawn underwater, or bent around a spool.

Physicist Charles Kao was the 1^st one to suggest that glass fibres could be a superior medium for telecommunication than copper wires for which he received Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009.

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