How Fiber Optics Is Made

It often surprising that we have several contrivances for everyday use yet ignorant by large on how they operate. That is highly true with regards to fiber optics; hitherto we are more predisposed of clunking faulty receivers who ‘garbled’ voices over the phone and not even considering how the fiber optic material may not attenuate signals as clearly.

Fiber optics is complicated science, and how fiber optics is made is much more so. Hopefully by explaining the fundamental concepts on how fiber optics is made readers could understand how the system truly works.

By the way, the term fiber optics is an often misused term. Fiber optics cannot be used to call the device employed; rightfully it is called optical fiber. Fiber optics instead is a branch of applied science predisposed in using and manipulating energy through an optical fiber. This clarification is needed to correct the oft used but context-wrong sentence. But for the sake of simplicity, we should continue using fiber optics as relevant to the device optical fiber.

How Fiber Optics is made with CVD?

So, how fiber optics is made? Fiber optics (optical fiber) is made through a series of chemical reactions. The first chemical process is a CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) where the preform ‘glass’ is the product of two gas substrates silicon tetrachloride (SiCl4) or germanium tetrachloride (GeCl4) mixed by precursor substance oxygen. Picture this; a hollow glass tube with ends injected with the reagents is slowly rotated horizontally over a lathe. As the mixture heats up, it allows chemical reaction to take place, and the tetrachloride reacts with oxygen releasing silicon or germanium to form silica or germania oxides which deposits and accumulates on the tube’s wall. After some time, a volume of the substance is accumulated until reaching a sufficient amount, forming the desired preform.

This resulting ‘preform’ glass is different from conventional glass in many ways, that it has several strictly regulated properties along the manufacturing guidelines. It is extremely pure, for instance, to meet refraction index* standard. It is even stated that your casual eye ‘looking through’ a mile thick of this ‘preform’ will still allow seeing the opposite end clearly.

There are three known methods for CVD, the Inside Vapor Deposition (as illustrated), Outside Vapor Deposition, and Vapor Axial Deposition. And regardless of the chemical deposition used, the preform is the byproduct by which glass fibers are drawn. The two reagent substances silicon tetrachloride (SiCl4) or germanium tetrachloride (GeCl4) is used in creating the preform.

Drawing Fibers from the Preform

However created, the preform ends up on a drawing tower device. This device is another furnace, but no chemical reaction takes place. What it does is melt the preform blank* starting from the tip. The exit for the melted glass is at the bottom, a precision hole where the liquid passes through, falling and cooling as it does, forming a continues, laser micrometer regulated diameter, and collects on a tractor spool.

*Refraction Index, in the optical fiber concept, is the phase velocity in which light can travel along the fiber

*preform material already checked for quality control.

All You Need To Know About Fiber Optics Communication

For the better part of the decade, DSL is a major proponent when it comes to telecommunications. It is already expansive in reach due to the already present spider web lattice of telephone and cable wires that literally strung the US continent. It has incremental degrees of service, useful on a nation that’s generally stuck with contrasting extremes of wealth. But why is this seemingly established technology tethering precariously on the edge?

It is the expanding presence of fiber optics, a stronger media that had already made an impact by starting the Information Age. It has overcome the topographical limit of copper telephone lines, and similarly it has overcome the speed by which DSL (and the succeeding generations of ASDL, SDSL, and HDSL) have been so very proud to exclaim.

The secret is the installation of far-reaching network of intercity and transoceanic optical fiber communications line. Among this is the Submarine Communications Cable with the capacity of 2.56 terabit per second. This speed is already overwhelming if you compare it with the conventional 512 kilobits per second average of ADSL. That is why several physical institutions had ceased to exist, at least physically. Because businesses can be as easily conducted through the internet as being conducted anywhere else, making the heritage of Wallstreet obsolete and concepts such as Intangible Economy and Technocapitalism an influential economic structure used today.

Yet for all the superiority of fiber optics, fiber optics communications is still leagues behind in practicality. That is due to the high cost involved in its installation, which contrasts to the already present bundles of telephone wires. You’d have to pay several times more than what you might pay for a DSL connection. However, the benefits are distinct, there’s no way DSL, ADSL, SDSL, and HDSL can compete with optical fiber.

But that doesn’t change the fact that fiber optics is still the best telecommunications technology available. Yes, copper can be fast, in fact ADSL is already fast, and can rival fiber optics in power. But in the long run, copper just couldn’t compete technically with fiber optics. This is the Information Age; by the way. An age where information leaps by unlimited bounds, moving faster than physical movement, achieving the speed of light – and can you say the same with copper cables? Not exactly, that is fiber optics communication.