From: heller@deepsoft.com   
      
   At Sat, 05 Jul 2014 20:32:03 -0500 Stephen Sprunk  wrote:   
      
   >   
   > On 05-Jul-14 07:55, Larry Sheldon wrote:   
   > > On 7/5/2014 7:32 AM, Jishnu Mukerji wrote:   
   > >> So you are correct, unless for some odd reason the customer wants   
   > >> to pay for installing fiber all over the house nothing of the sort   
   > >> is going to happen, specially when there is pre-installed copper   
   > >> and coax.   
   > >   
   > > Back in the 1980s the company I worked for was the first occupants   
   > > of the re-purposed Rincon Annex Post Office building, and as part of   
   > > the installation,, they paid for a custom cable that ran 6 or 8 pairs   
   > > of copper and two pairs of fiber to EVERY cube in the warren.   
   > >   
   > > The company is long gone and I have no idea who occupies the space or   
   > > if any of the New Age insanity remains, but I wonder if any of that   
   > > fiber was ever lighted.  (And no, I don't think the copper supported   
   > > UTP Ethernet because the Macintosh people ran their own Firewire to   
   > > cubes that were to access the communal laser printer.   
   >   
   > Lots of folks bought into fiber vendors' claims that copper couldn't   
   > handle anything better than 10Mb/s.  Then 100Mb/s Ethernet appeared,   
   > which only required slightly better quality copper, and a few years   
   > after that 1Gb/s Ethernet.  Interest in fiber mostly evaporated.   
      
   Copper does have an ultimate upper end -- this is just the nature of the   
   technology (nature of the physics involved). I expect it is probably somewhere   
   between 1 and 10 Gb/s. Wireless probably tops out arround a few hundred   
   Mb/s. Fiber OTOH, has bandwidth that is far beyond that. Right now, Fiber's   
   bandwidth is limited by the *electronics* at the ends: the switching speed of   
   the LEDs and PhotoTransistors. But when Quantium computers become available   
   and it becomes possible to generate photons directly from Quantium   
   interactions, only fiber will have the bandwidth to handle the sort of   
   bandwidths possible. (No, not going to happen for a few decades, but it will   
   eventually happen.) Actually it is already possible to push 10s of Gb/s   
   through fiber with current technology, using multiple wavelengths. Also, there   
   is the matter of attenuation / signal loss over distance. I don't think it is   
   possible to run miles and miles and miles of 1Gb/s *copper* Ethernet...   
      
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