r/interestingasfuck • u/Quiet-Estimate7409 • 12h ago
A large strand of copper bundled wire, and the fibre optic cable that replaced it.
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u/jameswalker50 12h ago
A perfect example of how technology made things smaller, faster, and more efficient at the same time.
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u/Mental_Thing_7899 12h ago
The biggest monster was 9600 cables... (4800 pairs) . The biggest I had to fix was 8400 .... we ended up trashing it and replaced with 5 smaller ones.
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u/Nonstopshooter21 11h ago
We found one of those once with a 349 tooth bucket. locate was 32ft off. Cleared excavation path so operator was just going at it. made it about 3 buckets in before he found the mother load of rainbow roots.
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u/Mental_Thing_7899 10h ago
Yep the bigger they are the deeper they went. And reason is simple.... to not it make it is easy to steal. We had to deal with organized Strippers capable off... no, not those! Cooper strippers! ... stealing cables with thousands of pairs in it at once. They would dig at 2 places at the same time, cut both ends, one of them pulls, sometimes just by tow, sometimes they would have DiY pull and roll systems.
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u/Nonstopshooter21 10h ago
Damn thats crazy... yeah this pack was only 5-5.5ft deep if I recall correctly. Shit was fuckkkked. Locate company that did it was small and caused them to file bankruptcy after the court case was finished lol.
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u/Dirty-M518 7h ago
I work in the telecom industry/phone factory. Im in Supply chain…never seen a 9600 here, but I have 3600pr copper right outside my window and its chonky. I also have some 864f right to it, about as thick as your thumb.
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u/Away_Media 11h ago
This was an interesting post.
If you plug the absolute best commercial equipment into 100 feet of coax, you get 10 Gbps. If you plug the best commercial equipment into 100 feet of single-mode fiber, you get over 100 Tbps. Fiber has at least 10,000 times the data capacity of coaxial cable over that exact same 100-foot run.
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u/Effective-Two-1376 11h ago
How the hell did they terminate that cable and get the connections correct?
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u/opeth10657 10h ago
Everything is bundled by color. That huge cable is actually a bunch of smaller bundled cables inside the same protective sleeve
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u/Abracadaver14 7h ago
It's not entirely accurate to say the fibre optic replaced that bundle of copper wire. That bundle of copper represented a lot of potential distinct point to point connections while the fibre optic is a single point to point connection.
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u/Desperate-Abalone954 3h ago
While this is true, there is a great deal of space in a fiberoptic cable to send multiple signals at once. This is called multiplexing, and basically works by sending light pulses of different colors through the cable at the same time so they don't get mixed.
The cable in the picture is also a feeder cable, which are meant for long distance transmission, not a distribution cable, which are meant for your house, and more in line with what you're describing. So it's entirely possible that that big cable in the picture did get replaced by a handful of the fibers shown (possibly even by the fiber in frame)
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u/popeter45 1h ago
Look up WDM and specify DWDM used for trunk links like this, the single fibre can carry dozens of individual links separated by wavelength so a simple prism at each end can be used to separate to customers
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u/tjorben123 6h ago
same capacity in 1976. today, with multi laser multi entry and exit-angles and the faaar superior computing power, id say we can easy put 100gigabit through that fiber in real world appliance. in universitys i assume they could put something like 5-10 terrabits through.
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u/ToastWastesEnergy 12h ago
Did it work better?
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u/tooclosetocall82 12h ago
Our entire communication infrastructure relies on fiber, so I’m going to say yes.
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u/TerrorSnow 11h ago
Fiber will always be superior to copper for data.
Fun / sad example: Germany.
Due to stupid lobbying (because when has lobbying ever not been the reason for garbage decisions) in the 80s, we built our internet infrastructure with copper instead of fiber. Now we're struggling to replace it with fiber. We're struggling to get decent internet speeds in many places because there's just copper. We have problems left and right because of signal noise, old hardware causing noise or other problems, capacity, availability...
Thankfully in my city, the city itself is paying to get fiber into more streets.•
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u/dalgeek 10h ago
The opposite thing happened in the US in the 90s. There was massive investment in fiber with tens of billions of dollars given to ISPs to run fiber everywhere they could. First, a lot of the ISPs took the money and didn't actually install the fiber. Then DSL became popular but it doesn't run over fiber, so every neighborhood that had freshly installed fiber needed an additional DSLAM to terminate the fiber connection and provide DSL over copper pairs.
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u/TerrorSnow 2h ago
The funny part about that is: the same corporations that didn't invest in Germany, invested in the US.
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u/KarlAu3r 8h ago
To add to this. The chancellor responsible also had friends in the private TV sector who relied on the copper network
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u/JCDU 11h ago
Massively so - no crosstalk, no interference, unaffected by moisture, unaffected by lightning strikes, goes round corners easier, weighs less, takes up less space in the duct, easier to install (many fibres are blown into pre-installed tubes using compressed air - install the tubes once you can add/replace fibres as needed).
Also as the tech improves you can get far more data down the same fibre just by plugging it into better equipment on either end.
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u/ThrownAway17Years 11h ago
You guys should see the tech that’s developing right now in the fiber industry. 2.0mm cables are being developed, allowing for higher throughput panels without having to swap out entire assemblies or panels. Petabits per second.
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u/Bajanboy246 11h ago
When i see things like this, I always believe we are just mere years off of the impossible. What would be a medical invention or procedure that would equate to this ?
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u/Bdr1983 11h ago
There is a chip that can diagnose the presence of childhood leukemia(and many other things, but this one is the thing we're most proud of) in a drop if blood in a few seconds, much earlier than regular blood tests can.
It uses a laser and a spectrometer to detect the cells and determine whether they are affected or not.
It's in trial stages.•
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u/Quiet-Estimate7409 12h ago
I grew up in the early 70s, and we actually had the telephone switchboard in our house for the operators. There was an identical cable running under and into our house for the switchboard.
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u/g0atdude 12h ago
I don't get it, the operators were working in your house? why?
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u/Quiet-Estimate7409 10h ago
My mom was one of the operators, and many of her lady friends. The switchboard took up pretty much an entire room. After technology advanced in the 70s, these switchboards became obsolete. The framework for the switchboard assemblies were built from 1" thick hardwood boards. My dad dismantled them, repurposed all the wood into shelving and other projects and tossed the switchboard stuff into the woods behind our house. Again, the 70s.
In 1984 or 85 my friends and I found all the old hardware. It was kinda cool. Not knowing what it was, I started dragging it home lol.
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u/tooclosetocall82 11h ago
Maybe they mean a PBX? Typically those we used by offices to allow multiple simultaneous phone calls and direct dial to a desk, but I suppose a home could have had one too if they wanted and could afford it.
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u/leon_reynauld 12h ago
A bit misleading, undersea fibre has a considerable protective cover. Though its still much smaller then the copper equivalent.
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u/RubiksCube9x9 12h ago edited 11h ago
It's not misleading because that's not an undersea copper cable, just a high pair cable >600 pairs. Even if all pairs are being used for data, the 1 fiber can still carry more.
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u/TestyBoy13 12h ago
I don’t know if that copper cable is an undersea cable, but I know fiber undersea cables have many multiple strands and protection and they are still only the width of a garden hose
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u/Sonderbefehl937 4h ago
Technology we reverse engineered from the Roswell alien spacecraft crash in 1947
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u/crunkful06 8h ago
That’s a telecom cable, not internet.
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u/MattyS71 6h ago
Internet was mostly on copper cable for decades…high cap circuits, ISDN, 56k, DSL, ADSL, T1 etc all working on old lead sheathed paper pulp twisted pair cable that was placed before the 1920’s in my area. I’m sure it worked on the much newer plastic insulated cable in the picture.
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u/crunkful06 6h ago
It hasn’t been this type of cable and decades. It’s all single core coax. This that’s pictured in the picture is two pair wire that’s used for old copper wire telephones not used for Internet
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u/Quiet-Estimate7409 7h ago
I never said it was internet cable.
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u/MattyS71 6h ago
A cable like that likely served internet to hundreds of homes in the late 90s early to mid 2000’s.
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u/crunkful06 6h ago
No, it was used for telephones just because you could use dial up on. It doesn’t mean that’s primary use was for Internet
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u/MattyS71 5h ago
I didn’t mention dialup. You’re missing an entire evolution of internet and how it has been provided over the last 30 years.
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u/crunkful06 5h ago
Bro, whatever you want to do to try to defend your point whatever but the reality is that the application is that we went from two stranded Internet to fiber that is not the case I’m not gonna argue with you anymore
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u/crunkful06 7h ago
You did not disclose it either, in fact it’s heavily implied
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u/CombatMuffin 6h ago
No? Anyone who knows about the topic slightly, knows that copper and fiber optics are used for much more stuff than just the internet. They wouldn't call it, an "internet cable", and OP didn't.
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u/crunkful06 6h ago
Reading comprehension is dead in the new days because I didn’t say he called it. It’s heavily implied the copper cable that is pictured is two strand telephone wire use primarily for telephone later for dial up, it’s primary purposes for telephone communications and not clarifying that and do a side-by-side comparison of two strand wire to fiber which fiber is use primarily for in internet communication it was a false comparison and a lot of people don’t know the infrastructure of coax cabling or that fiber is used and all coax Internet providers, except for the last leg
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u/Mr_Gobbles 12h ago
It's probably an even greater difference now with newer bands increasing the total available light spectrum, increasing wavelength bandwidth on the same cable.