Fiber optics has better features than the old ADSL and allows even small towns to have a fast and stable connection
There are technologies that allow you to do things that were impossible before and there are technological leaps that project a territory into a new dimension overnight. Jumps like the arrival of fiber optic connections in small municipalities and Italian villages where before ADSL barely arrived.
A big difference, which opens up countless possibilities and which would not have been possible without a technology switch. This is because ADSL, which still travels on a copper pair, has technical limits: if the distance between the telephone exchange and the user is too great, performance collapses. This is not the case, however, for fiber optics that maintains high performance even over long distances with the installation of a few intermediate infrastructures. Unlike ADSL, then, fiber is a very robust connection that withstands bad weather and is therefore particularly suitable, for example, for connections in the mountains.
Fiber Optic: Why it is so fast
All these advantages are due to the technical characteristics of fiber optics, which is completely different from the copper pair used for ADSL connections. The optical fiber is composed of two concentric layers (heart and mantle) of transparent material (glass, with different percentages of silica between the heart and mantle). Light flows inside the core, which cannot escape because it is reflected inward by the mantle. Each optical fiber is then coated with a protective plastic material. The result is a cable that allows extremely fast communication between two points, which is not affected by any electromagnetic interference, has no problems in case of extreme temperatures, rain, snow. Moreover, since the fiber optic bundles are very thin, very often it is not even necessary to dig into the ground to lay the fiber optics, but they use existing pipes with some space still free.
Another very interesting thing about the fiber optics is that it is "low consumption": it is necessary to use energy only if there is an effective transmission of data (i.e. light), otherwise the fiber remains "off". But that's not all: even in real use phase, energy consumption is much lower than that of ADSL connections. For all these reasons, fiber can also be extended over long distances without the need for intermediate exchanges. We are talking about tens of kilometers.
Fiber optics: all the advantages for the villages
A good pure fiber connection, with FTTH technology (Fiber to the Home), is the maximum that can be asked today in terms of Internet connection: up to 1 Gbit download speed, very low latency, connection stability. If a house far from a telephone exchange passes from ADSL to fiber, the first thing that those who live there will notice is the significantly higher speed, the absence of buffering while watching streaming video, the ability to download large files in no time.
The FTTC technology (Fiber to the Cabinet, fiber to the cabinet in the street) is proposed as a compromise to bring fiber optics only up to the street cabinet, and exploit from there on the old copper structure, but with many limitations. Surely, if on the one hand it is a much better connection than the previous ADSL, on the other hand you will get a significant signal limitation, due to the use of the copper band in the last stretch. The distance between the area cabin and the housing unit also contributes, since the longer the copper stretch, the greater the signal dispersion, compromising the connection quality, making it unstable and slowed down
Fiber optics: is it the best technology?
For the coverage of small towns, FTTH fiber optics is certainly the best technology: the impact on the territory is very low, a simple digging in the street is enough, the performances are excellent and the possible technical problems are minimal. A recent example of success is the municipality of Vetto that thanks to fiber optic connections has managed to counteract the depopulation of the small village. Compared to other technologies such as 5G, fiber has the advantage of being able to arrive almost everywhere and with uniform performance: in a municipality wired with fiber optics all users will have the same infrastructure, with the same coverage, with the same maximum performance.
Even 5G connections, then, need fiber optics: the high volume of data carried on these networks, in fact, requires high performance backbones to which to connect mobile sites. Such performances, today, are possible only with pure fiber technology, so that it is not wrong to say that fiber is an "enabling" technology of 5G: the more fiber backbones there are, the faster will be the 5G mobile connections.