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Fiber Broadband Networks

What is Broadband?

 


Organizations working on fiber broadband projects may find these resources useful in starting a project and finding funding.

FOA's page on broadband resources.

FOA also has a page devoted to rural broadband and its unique requirements and a page on Fiber Broadband FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions.

If you are working on a IIJA/BEAD project, contact FOA for a package of useful educational materials - info@thefoa.org

If you are concerned or involved with workforce development, t
his FOA page on workforce development can help you understand the fiber optic workforce.

FOA Book: Fiber Broadband

FOA Guide To Fiber BroadbandIn less than half a century, fiber optics has revolutionized communications and to a large extent, society in general. Broadband, what many today call high speed Internet access, has become a necessity for everyone, not a luxury. The technology that makes broadband possible is fiber optics, connecting the continents, cities, and just about everybody. Even fiber to the home (FTTH) brings broadband to hundreds of millions worldwide.

How did we get from an era when communications was making a telephone call or sending a telegram to today’s world where every piece of information – and misinformation – is available at the click of a mouse or touch on a screen? How did we get from a time when a phone was connected on copper wires to being able to connect practically anywhere on a handheld device with more computing power than was available to scientists and engineers only decades ago?

How does broadband work? Without fiber optics it would not work.

This book is not the typical FOA technical textbook - it is written for anyone who wants to understand fiber broadband or fiber optics or the Internet. It's also aimed at STEM teachers wh want to include communications technology in their classes. This book will try to explain not only how fiber broadband works, but how it was developed. It is intended to be an introduction to communications technology appropriate for a communications course at almost any level (junior high, high school or college,) for managers involved with broadband projects, or for anyone who just wonders how all this stuff works.

The Fiber Optic Association Guide To Fiber Broadband  

Paperback available from Amazon or most booksellers. Kindle version coming soon.

Nobody knows more about fiber broadband than the Fiber Optic Association. If you are working on an IIJA/BEAD program contact us for a special package of educational materials for your staff.


What is Broadband?

Have you ever tried an Internet search for "broadband"? We did and got 428 MILLION results. Searching for "Taylor Swift" only got about twice as many results! There certainly is a lot of talk about broadband. "Broadband" has become synonymous with "high speed Internet connection," but that's not where the term originated.

what is broadband?

Ever wonder about the origin of "broadband"? If you look at some of the links you get from the Google search, almost every link has a different definition according to their viewpoint.In February 1997 the first consumers were connected to the Internet with what we call  "broadband" today. 

Up to that point, most users connected to the Internet with "dial-up" modems on a POTS (plain old telephone service) copper line. Dial-up connection speeds at the time were mainly 14.4 kilobits per second or 56 kilobits per second. Yes, kilobits per second - thousands of bits per second. The only alternatives for digital phone connections was T1 service at 1.544 megabits/second  and thousands of dollars per month connection fees. ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) over copper phone wires had been announced but was rarely available and faded quickly.

The innovation that introduced "broadband" Internet access to the consumer was the Cable Modem, developed in the Boston, Massachusetts area by Rouzbeh Yassini at Applitek.  Yassini turned Applitek into LanCity to manufacture the cable modem for CATV companies. The original Applitek design was a networking system using coax cable and FM (frequency modulation), a technique then called "broadband". Yassini realized the commonality of design with CATV systems and developed a system to put data on spare channels of a CATV system and the cable modem as created.

The T1 line from the phone company and most other networks like Ethernet were AM (amplitude modulation) systems commonly called "baseband" systems. When a broadband network like CATV with cable modems became the source of high data rate Internet access, broadband became synonymous with high bandwidth. Today broadband refers to any high bandwidth network. Fiber broadband is probably redundant since no high bandwidth network runs without fiber optics.

CATV companies were already using fiber optics to upgrade their networks to hybrid fiber coax networks using special lasers called DFB lasers also developed in Boston by AT&T. The combination of the large numbers of subscribers to CATV and the technologies of HFC networks and cable modems made broadband a reality to many subscribers very quickly.

The telcos tried to match cable modem speeds over their twisted pair wires but with little success. The development of digital subscriber line (DSL) lasted through more than 20 generations of standards and still has advocates today, although most major telcos have abandoned it in favor of fiber to the home (FTTH.) DSL was never going to be able to keep up because of the physics of transmitting electrical signals over the telco twisted pair wires.

Fiber to the home is considered the ultimate solution to provide broadband for today and the foreseeable future, but the CATV companies have not been standing still. From the original cable modem speeds of 4 Mb/s, they have developed new cable modem technology that can now do gigabit speeds for downloads but are more limited in upload speeds. Most CATV companies have experimented with and are prepared to move to FTTH when necessary.

What Others Say About The Development Of The Cable Modem


Interview with Dr. Rouzbeh Yassini SCTE Broadband Library
Dr. Rouzbeh Yassini was interviewed by SCTE about the cable modem.

It’s ironic that sometimes cable doesn’t get credit for ushering in the broadband revolution.

I think the cable industry didn’t get credit for three things. First, we didn’t get credit for bringing broadband to the market — and we still don’t. We really haven’t marketed the word ‘broadband’ as a cable innovation. Second, we didn’t get credit for doing this with the persona of entrepreneurs versus established, giant companies. And lastly, for making it nearly ubiquitous; for making this technology available and continuously improved with faster speeds and better performance. For making the revolution an evolution. We were bad at marketing and public relations. We were good at delivering services and solutions and making a lot of innovation happen.
Dr. Yassini in an interview in SCTE Broadband Library.

First Person History

Your editor (JH) became one of the first consumers to get a LanCIty cable modem at our home in a suburb of Boston. We had an inside track since Applitek was a customer of our fiber optic company and we chaired the tech committee for the schools in our town that was also home to a number of people involved in the development of the technology. The schools in our town did field trials of the cable modem prototypes using the CATV connections provided to the school system by our local cable company Continental Cablevision. The cable modem prototypes were built into large desktop PC cases. By the time we got our connection at home, the device had been shrunk to the size of a cable box.

What a difference "broadband" made! Instead of 56 kilobit/s, we had 4 megabits/second speed, almost 75 times faster and always on 24/7! Uploading was also spectacular, 1 Mb/s. The speed made the expensive T1 line at the office seem really slow.

Today, we still use a cable modem and our service provider is the local CATV company. We get about 300 Mb/s download but only about 10Mb/s upload, the major downside of cable modem service. Otherwise, the HFC network is plenty fast and reliable, which makes us less unhappy that we can't get FTTH.

You can see the actual hardware in the photo below. The video gives an insider's story of the development.


Lancity cable modem box

Gene O'Neill tells the story of working with LanCity to develop the cable modem. The big box was the prototype we tested on the school I-Net (institutional network) coax cable TV system. The smaller gray box he is holding is what was installed in our home by Continental Cablevision in February 1997. Watch the Video on YouTube.


What's called broadband today can be FTTH (fiber to the home), cable modem service from a CATV network, line of sight wireless, 5G cellular or even digital subscriber line (DSL) over copper phone wires.

Read more In The FOA Guide - Introduction To Broadband 







FOA FTTH/Broadband Resources

Note: Most of the material in the links below assumes the reader has a general knowledge of fiber optics and fiber optic networks. If you need some background, we recommend you start with these self-study courses at Fiber U, FOA's free online learning site.

Introduction To Fiber Optics In Communications  

Basic Fiber Optics  

FTTx - Fiber To The Home, etc. 


FOA page on workforce development

Articles from the FOA Newsletter

FOA Newsletter

October 2023 The New BLS "Telecommunications Technicians" Web Page And Its Meaning For The Telecom/Fiber Workforce 

October 2022 Wireless/Satellite, Broadband Saturation

September 2022 Does the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) truly benefit people in rural America?

August 2022  Many More IIJA Infrastructure Projects Besides Broadband Will Need Fiber

July 2022 Why Stop At Gigabits? Let's Design Fiber Networks For Terabits - It's The Future!
 
March 2022 Is Rural Only Farms?

February 2022 Helping Make Rural Broadband Possible -
New FOA Technical/Educational Materials For Those Planning Rural Broadband

January 2022 - California Announces 18 Middle Mile Projects To Bridge Digital Divide (mostly rural)

June 2021 - FTTH Special Issue  (FTTH Tech Update covering new equipment and network architectures for rural FTTH.

November/December 2021 - Fiber To The Village in Nepal, $Billions For Broadband In US (But don't hold your breath!)

August, 2021   - Rural FTTH Special Issue

July 2021 - Broadband Internet in California, California Broadband Council report

March 2021 - Can Tapping Fiber Reduce Cost?  How Many Fibers? Optimal cable Size. 



FOA FTTH Handbook

FOA's FTTH Handbook: We've gathered all our information on FTTH from the FOA Guide and past issues of the FOA Newsletter and edited it into a 112 page "FTTH Handbook." We even added new sections on planning, designing and managing FTTH Projects. An entire chapter is devoted to DIY (do-it-yourself) FTTH projects in rural areas. English and Spanish editions.
The Fiber Optic Association Fiber To The Home Handbook is available from Amazon in print and Kindle editions.
La Asociación de Fibra Óptica Manual de Fibra Hasta el Hogar : Para Planificadores, Gestores, Diseñadores, Instaladores y Operadores De FTTH  Amazon

FOA Guide
The FOA Guide is FOA's extensive knowledge base on fiber optics, with almost 1,000 pages of technical information. It's written by FOA's worldwide network of technical advisors and is non-commercial, just reliable technical information from experienced fiber techs, many of whom are teaching the subject.

Here are some topics related to broadband:


FTTH (Fiber To The Home)                                     
Fiber to the home (FTTH) Overview,   
FTTH Introduction
FTTH Architectures,
FTTH in MDUs,
FTTH PON Standards, Specifications and Protocols,
FTTH Network Design
FTTH Installation
FTTH Customer Premises Installation  
FTTH Testing  ,
FTTH Case Studies: Do-It-Yourself FTTH  
FTTH Project Management   

There is also a section on Fiber For Wireless Networks. that covers both cellular and WiFi networks.                                 



Fiber U

Fiber U is FOA's Free Online Learning Site, with over two dozen free self-study courses starting with the Basics of Fiber Optics and including a number of courses on technical skills and applications of fiber optics.

Free Online "FTTH" Course on Fiber U

Free Online "Fiber For Wireless" Course on Fiber U

Fiber U online courses
Take the Fiber U FTTH course and Certificate Test FREE
Fiber U self-study courses themselves have always been free, but we have charged for the Fiber U Certificate of Completion test which uses an online testing service. So everyone can take advantage of all the new and updated FTTH materials we've created, FOA will offer the testing for the Fiber U Certificate of Completion for the Fiber U FTTx self-study course free to everyone completing the course. Tell your employees, customers, everybody!

 

Designing FTTH Networks? If you are involved in the design of FTTH networks but new to fiber optics, start with the Fiber U Fiber Optic Network Design course then take the Fiber U FTTx self-study course.



FOA YouTube Channel
FOA Videos On YouTube

FOA has a YouTube channel with over 100 videos on fiber optics, including 70+ lectures and many technical instructional videos. Including are these videos on Fiber Optics:

FOA's YouTube Channel:
Lecture 25: FTTx - Fiber To The Home, Premises, Curb, Business, etc.(Overview)
Lecture 63 FTTH Network Architectures  
Lecture 64 FTTH Passive Optical Networks (PONs) 
Lecture 65 FTTH Network Design 
Lecture 66 FTTH Network Installation and Test  
Lecture 70 Rural Broadband- Obstacles and Opportunities  



 

Contact the FOA  



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