ntages so why should anyone use this type of a system? This question is easy to answer. People like speed. Fiber optics have a huge bandwidth. A way to explain bandwidth is like this. Think of information as a car. You have a big car and you want to put it into a garage. Bandwidth is the garage. If you have a small garage you will have a hard time getting your car inside of it. Fiber optics is like having a huge garage where you could fit ten of your cars and you don’t have to slow down for anything. The more bandwidth also means greater capacity, which larger companies need. Another advantage is security, a fiber optic cable cannot be tapped because if the light connection is broken then the system won’t work and they will know that there is a problem with the system. Another advantage is that it is versatile. It can handle all kinds of media data, voice and video. It can do all of those things that copper wire can do only it is hundreds of times faster then a copper wire. Now we will move on to some history of optical communication. The person who first invented an optical telephone was Alexander Graham Bell he invented it in 1880. He called it the Photophone. He found that his earlier invention the telephone was much more reliable. How did Photophone work? The Photophone worked by using the suns light. He focused the light on a mirror and attached the mirror to a device that when he spoke shook the mirror. On the other end of his Photophone was another mirror that received the light and reflected the light to a device that decoded it and made sound. This is almost exactly how a fiber optic system works today. Except now we use fibers to send the light and don’t rely on the sun for the light. Bell scraped this invention because he found that it depended on too much. If there was bad weather the Photophone tended to be unreliable. So now that the technology to transmit information by the use ...
