Masood Parwez Shabnam, Assistant Manager, Broadcast Technical, DishTV India Ltd.
As we all know that fiber optics is an emerging technology in the present and will be ruling in the future replacing most of the copper connections which are being used to provide the Internet facility, triple play, and broadband to the media industry and homes by ISP or MSOs. OFC (optical fiber cable) is very thin in size and is capable of transferring larger bandwidth signals at a very high speed of 1 gigabit per second.
In my perspective in the coming years OFC will be the key in the future for the broadcast industry, CATV, and Internet industry due to high rise of data usage and people spending more time on the web. The signal will reach homes by ISP or an FTTH provider through fiber optics only.
When using fibers there are no such difficulties; they have larger bandwidth as well as faster speeds and are weather proof. In fiber optics, armored fiber optic cables are used. As the name suggests, these optical cables have armors. When working in extreme environmental conditions, it is important to protect cables from outside damage to ensure they can operate safely and smoothly. And this is where the so-called armored fiber optic cables come into play, which are mainly adopted to protect the cables from being eaten by rats and dampened by moisture.
As per todays requirements of high speed and HD quality fiber optics technology is most suitable. People want videos running without any buffering and an Internet page should open in one click without any delay. Expectations of high speed are only possible through fiber optics.
Fiber optics is already being used by FTTH (fiber to the home). The main feature of fiber optics is that it is very easy and can be used where there is a loss in coaxial cables used for long distances. They replace all copper cables with fiber cables and in place of that they get services like Internet, broadband, CATV, HD channels with better quality without any freezing, and macroblocks with high speed. So if consumers are able to receive all services at a higher cost they will be very happy to pay for such types of services over fiber optics.
As of now, broadcasters, DTH operators, government organizations, private institutions, etc. are using fiber optics to receive high bandwidth signals and files. ISP provides them the fiber connectivity to run their business. This is very secure and faster than any other medium being used such as copper and coaxial connectivity.
The main thing in the fiber technology is the maintenance. The ISP will have to maintain the fiber line and equipments like FMS (fiber management system), converters, transmitters, and receivers should be well-maintained.
In future every home will start receiving signals through fiber optics and DTH industry MSOs have to adopt the fiber optics line to provide better signals to their consumers in order to sustain in the competitive market.
As per the survey the demand of the optical fibers is rising in India. In future, major growth is expected from India and abroad. This shows that there is a potential for growth of fiber optics in CATV and the Internet industry.
The convergence of technologies, emergence of high-speed broadband, changing lifestyles have led to an exponential increase in the data usage per user globally as well as in India; with the changing lifestyles people are spending more time on the web. The need for being connected 24×7 for various business operations has also increased the data usage.
The future projections for the global Internet traffic show a widespread increase in data usage. As data usage will increase there will be a need for high-speed Internet networks with huge bandwidth in order to absorb the traffic. Fiber optics has the potential to offer such high-speed networks greater than 1 GB/s and there is thus a huge potential for fiber optics in the future.