Phone companies were the first consumers of mass bandwidth and such groups as the British Post Office, AT&T, and Sprint were the first to install fiber optic communication. However, as the world has become more "wired", there has been a trend towards "desktop fiber."
Since modern corporations require state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment and high-speed transmission to do business, many office complexes are being built or remodeled with fiber optic networking. Universities looking at upgrading aging systems have found that the decreasing costs of fiber components and the ease of installing the medium actually saves the university money compared to copper rewiring (Fiber Pays Dividends Direct to the Desktop, Atikem Haile-Mariam). Banks, secondary schools, air force bases, and laboratories are all starting to install fiber optic cables (go here for recent profiles of such places).
Use at Carleton
Fiber plays an important part of Carleton's data network. We have 33 buildings connected to the network on campus, and multimode fiber connects them together. We are running three protocols between buildings on the fiber: an old, proprietary 10 Mbps Ethernet; 10-Base-FL 10 Mbps Ethernet; and 100-Base-FX 100 Mbps Ethernet. We are even have a 1000-Base-SX Gigabit Ethernet link between two hubs in CMC.
These are all point-to-point flavors of Ethernet, much like 10-Base-T (that is, twisted-pair copper). The use of fiber lets us exceed the length limits (90 meters) of Ethernet on twisted-pair copper. It also gives us electrical isolation between the buildings.
The start of the fiber network was installed in the mid-1980s, primarily for electrical isolation. Prior to that there was a significant amount of data copper connecting the buildings, and a significant amount of lightning damage every year.
There is one other significant bit of data fiber on campus. The data network in Hulings is multimode fiber to the desktop. It's currently all 10-Base-FL 10 Mbps Ethernet, so it's not faster or otherwise better than in any other building. We used fiber in Hulings because of a significant potential problem in electrical noise. Although a more traditional twisted-pair network would probably work in Hulings, we couldn't guarantee it, and we are almost certain that 100-Base-TX 100 Mbps Ethernet would NOT work.
We do not have any single-mode fiber on campus yet, and no immediate plans for installation. The data bandwidths are potentially great, but there is a significant price tag for that potential. The cabling itself is more expensive, but the optics/electronics required to use single-mode fiber is *very* expensive.
(Information from Les Lecroix, Carleton Networking)
Last Modified: 3/15/00
By Brian Patterson and
Erin Quealy