- When you flip a light switch, light is projected from a bulb and transmitted into the room, illuminating the surrounding space. Like the torch fiber optic cables send data thousands of kilo meters away in an instant.
- It is a system that uses highly purified glass, a laser and reflection and refraction to load data from a server halfway around the world.
- When data is sent to fiber optic cable, it is sent as light which is continuously being reflected off of the sides of the fiber to keep the light inside the fiber. This is known as total internal reflection.
- The light travels through the glass core and is constantly reflected from the cladding around the core since the angle of the light is always greater than the critical angle.
- The cladding itself does not absorb any of the light means signal is able to travel long distances along the cable without losing any quality.
- The core and cladding are surrounded by a plastic coating and shroud made from strong fibers such as Kevlar or metals to hold it all together.
- Light can exist in two main states on or off and computers speak in a language with two digits 0 or 1.
- So rapidly blocking and then unblocking the beam of light, this can then be translated into packets of data comprising a series of 0s (on) and 1s (off) and finally give the data to the destination.
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