Bending Glass And Other Wonders

by Gregory Sullivan — Tuesday, July 24, 2007, 10:00 AM EDT

Corning Inc, the inventors of low-loss optical fiber wire in the 1970s, have devised a way to use nanostructures to allow fiber-optic cable to be bent around tight corners without loss of signal. This opens up the way for high speed fiber service to be made available to millions of customers in such places as apartment buildings and condominiums where incoming lines must be snaked through all sorts of walls to deliver service.

More than 1 percent of North American homes are now directly connected to fiber, but many of them are single-family dwellings, Render said.

"There obviously are a large number of people that live in multi-tenant buildings, and improvements in the way to get fiber to those individual living units could be very significant," he said.

Render said the technology would make it easier to bring fiber "all the way to each individual living room, for example, or at least to each floor," instead of taking it only to the basement and then using existing wiring to reach the living unit.

There are more than 25 million high-rise apartment homes in the United States and more than 680 million worldwide. "The high cost of installation and difficulty in delivering fiber to the home made this market unappealing to most providers," Volanakis said in a statement.

I had FiOS installed in my home, and it's very fast, and almost infinitely upgradeable on the same wire in the future. Television programming is soon to be made available here on the same wire. It's a fantastic alternative to cable. Now everyone can have it if they want it. A word to the wise: Buy RAM. Your end is the slow end now.

Tags: glass, and

Bending Glass And Other Wonders

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