I am really impressed at this. Not every single building housing around the global has fiber optic cables.
You guys might know the difference but here's physics 101. Copper wire, is just a very conductive metal both heat and electricity. All we need to know is that when electricity is pass through the wire, we can have signals. Its like Morse code, there are 1s and 0s or on and off, these 1s and 0s are pieces of code in which your computer would have the device or the algorithm to translate to useful packets of data.
The difference between Copper wire and fiber optics is that fiber optic cables uses light. Light are pretty much the fastest type of communication we can use known to date. The speed of light is ~300 000 000 metres / per second, and copper wires don't go that fast. The fiber optic cable uses, long strains of glass fiber flexible of course and wrapped with a reflective sheeting. This allows the light to bounce all the way from one to the other. It's a brilliant idea, but you have to ensure that the fiber optic is good quality, so over time of bending it won't break.
From this you can see why we like fiber optics no?
But apart from the speed, just think how long it takes to make copper and how long it takes to make fiber optic. For copper wires, you just melt couple of bars of copper mix it with some cheap but good quality gold (it's because gold has properties that prevent copper form rusting). For glass you have to first melt certain minerals obtain from sand and other specially made chemicals to give the fiber a flexible feature. After making a bar of flexible glass you have to melt and pull it so it makes a thin line. Not only it takes longer to make fiber optics, its more expensive.
Now back to the article at hand from Engadget. For Nokia Siemens Network to develop a new technology that pushes a normal copper wire to transfer 825 Mbps? I don't know about you that to me that is damn well pretty amazing. My USB 2.0 plugs can do only 500Mbps, and that's just a short wire directly connected to my computer!
I don't know about you guys, but if Nokia Siemens Network plays this right they could score the big home run (Mind the pun).
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