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On 18/01/11 18:10, Malcolm Blackmore wrote: > > Is it one strand per device in a multi stranded cable which needs to be > terminated to a plug or socket? The use of Optical fibre is a layer one in the network stack, you can run various different topologies over fibre and people have, and you can buy them. Typically optical switching technology has been expensive, and cable length is less of an issue for performance, and cable is cheap, and you can easily get many strands of fibre in the diameter of a cat 5 cable. These factors all push to a tendency to having big switches and individual fibres run to devices in big star like topologies. Some folk have even proposed metropolitan like networks where each device in each house is connected to a central exchange for a region similar to have POTS worked once. The only standard I've got my hands dirty with is the archaic FDDI, and the cable modem technologies. With Gigabit ethernet being so cheap, you need fairly big requirement to adopt fibre, such as providing big storage devices for virtual servers (and our providers are doing that was Gigabit ethernet run in parallel and it is all outsources so I don't get my hands dirty). Some of the 10Gbps ethernet standards use fibre, and in practice it is like an expensive switched ethernet. Typically the fibre stops at a wall point, then the wall point is an elaborate device to hold the two fibres together (avoiding any expensive electronics), Noticed virgin media still splice the cables and connect them manually, where as the old FDDI standard had a relatively simple click method that works at higher speeds than Virgin's connections (although I'm not sure what else they put down the cable for cable TV - probably that need the better connector. The buzz word phrase you need to search with is "fibre to the desktop" or "fttd". -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq