Fiber Optic Internet

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) is the new broadband service being installed in selected towns and estates across Tanzania, and other Greenfield developments. Fibre to the Home uses fibre optical cables to deliver ultra-fast broadband and telephone services with network interface speeds of up to 100Mbps*.

Why Use Fiber?

If fiber is more expensive, why have all the telephone networks been converted to fiber? And why are all the CATV systems converting to fiber too? Are their networks that different? Is there something they know we don't? Telcos use fiber to connect all their central offices and long distance switches because it has thousands of times the bandwidth of copper wire and can carry signals hundreds of times further before needing a repeater. The CATV companies use fiber because it give them greater reliability and the opportunity to offer new services, like phone service and Internet connections. Both telcos and CATV operators use fiber for economic reasons, but their cost justification requires adopting new network architectures to take advantage of fiber's strengths. A properly designed premises cabling network can also be less expensive when done in fiber instead of copper. There are several good examples of fiber being less.

High Speed Networking

It was over a year after Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) became available on fiber optics that it finally become available on Cat 5e. It took another couple of years before GbE on copper became significantly less expensive. In order to get GbE to work over Cat 5e, the electronics must be very complicated, and consequently as expensive as fiber. A newer version is in the wings, awaiting a Cat 6 standard, but that means the version running over Cat 5e will be obsolete before it even gets started! Finally, we went to a major distributor's seminar on advanced cabling recently and the copper marketing guy told us to go fiber for GbE.

Advantages

Optical fiber is hundreds of times faster than DSL, cable or wireless systems. And while the cable and phone companies' networks may be partially fiber, the Internet network is fiber all the way to your building. That means no bottlenecks or slowdowns can occur like they do when data reaches the copper technology that the other guys are using to deliver the signal to your residence.

Of course many factors affect bandwidth–including the type of transmission technology used, the length of the cable runs and the network architecture employed. And, actual speed is often less than what is promised in the service agreement. To get an accurate reading as to what your true Internet speed is go to speedtest. net and run the test.

Large files, like megapixel digital photos, applications for your computer or your favorite movies, can clog the pipes of lesser networks. But not Internet's fiber network. The bandwidth is enormous, and can keep massive amounts of data flowing freely, with no compression. As your need for speed continues to grow, and it will, a complete fiber network like ours is the only infrastructure ready to handle it. Files will continue to get bigger, along with the need for more bandwidth.