The coating is there, you can touch the fiber, it goes on the spool. After this, you put it in a box and you can ship it to the customer. There is nothing else to be done other than putting it in a cable.” The strands of fiber would be bundled inside a cable—a cable with 576 strands will have 24 colored “buffer” tubes, each with 24 individual fiber strands inside.
The coating, the layers of plastic cured around the fiber, doesn’t stop the fiber from bending. By serving as a kind of very thin cushion, the coating keeps the individual fibers inside any given cable from interfering with one another. (Corning fiber, these days, is made to bend easily, even around tight corners inside buildings or when wrapped around rods, without losing signal strength.) Months later, many hundreds of miles south of Corning, I would see that coating being carefully removed in order for one strand of bare glass to be precisely spliced to another strand of fiber.
fiber optic installer certification
Only fiber will facilitate the exponential growth of innovation and productivity in transportation, energy, health care, manufacturing, education, job training, disability access, augmented/virtual reality, government services, and public safety that will keep our living standards rising as they have in the past. Better lives, a sense that future generations will live better than we do—this sense of hope is not just an economic good but an essential requirement for happiness, tolerance of others, and resilience in the face of difficulty.
The countries that have made progress on this issue—South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Sweden—are driving toward this future. We need fiber in the same way, and for many of the same reasons, we need liberal democracy: to ensure that all Americans have opportunities to shape their own lives. It is basic infrastructure for a good life
