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.
Index To FOA Fiber Broadband Newsletter Articles And Technical Resources
If you are concerned or involved with workforce development, this FOA page on workforce development can help you understand the fiber optic workforce.
FOA Book: Fiber Broadband
 In 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.
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
 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.
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
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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
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)
There is also a section on Fiber For Wireless Networks. that covers both cellular and WiFi networks.
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
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 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
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