Fibre is the buzz word of all the ISP’s right now and that’s not just in Zimbabwe The US and UK are going big on fibre rollout with FiOS and Infinity to name just a few example products in those countries. Right here at home in Zimbabwe we have Fibroniks from ZOL. But what actually is the technology behind it? How does it compare to other technologies and how will ZOL Fibroniks change your life?

The Technology
Firstly, what is fibre? Fibre is described as the medium of transmission of the Internet signal. The Internet in fibre travels along minute glass fibres that are thinner than the average human hair at the speed of light. Compare this with alternative solutions that either use some form of radio wave in Wi-Max or copper which uses an electrical signal with ADSL.

Fibre has historically been used at the very core of the Internet, as we know it with the huge majority of the backbone of the global Internet running on fibre cables, because of their efficiency, high-speed capacity and zero emissions of heat or electrical interference. It is a light signal versus an electrical or radio signal; meaning it does not suffer from common issues that plague ADSL or Wi-Max. For example, ADSL can be badly impacted with things like electrical interference (high current power lines near phone line. etc.) as well as interferences from the quality of the cable. Electrical signals also suffer from what is known as power loss resulting from the length of the cable – the longer the cable is – the more intense these disruptions become.

Fibre on the other hand can often travel many kilometres without needing any assistance with signal boosting. This is compared to copper/ADSL technology which can only travel a few kilometre with speeds reducing the further you go. In simple terms the further away that you are from a base station or telephone exchange the slower your speed – fibre on the other hand is not affected by such, the speed of light is the same at one end as it is the other. If you get quoted a 20Mbps speed on ZOL Fibroniks, you can be sure that you will get it regardless of whether you are 5 meters away or 5 km away.

Ok so what about Wi-Max. Surely Wi- Max does not suffer from these metal ailments? Let me ask you this – have you ever tried surfing the Internet in a storm with Wi-Max? I have and it barely works if at all – that’s not forgetting having the equivalent of a large bulls-eye for a lightning bolt stuck to the side of your house if you are in a particularly poor signal area, which is an obvious safety consideration. Trees, other buildings and even clouds (particularly storm clouds) cause interference because Wi-Max works best when there is clear line of site between the base station and the end user.

Fibre does not give off any emissions or heat, which means it can be used in very sensitive scenarios, for example a recording/radio studio where interference can reduce the quality of a broadcast or recording; or even a hospital where interference could impact equipment and could easily result in a tragic incident in rare/extreme circumstances.

The Power
It’s no secret that the power situation in Zimbabwe is poor with frequent load shedding occurring in most areas. With traditional access technologies like Wi-Max and ADSL there needs to be more Points of Presence (PoP’s) or Base stations to maintain a usable speed for the majority of people.

This is a significant added power requirement on an already strained grid that can cause your Internet to go down if those areas have no power for extended periods of time. ZOL’s Fibroniks implementation can go further without any amplifiers/boosters between points of presence, which translated means, power usage can be focused at fewer points. This means your ZOL Fibroniks connection is more reliable and more power efficient, which not also contributes to energy efficiency but due to reduced cabling heat is in line with the going green agenda.

Closer to home and a motivating reason: Fibre home routers require on average less power to operate than their ADSL or Wi-Max counterparts and that means that your Invertor or UPS will last longer, giving you precious extra minutes or hours browsing the internet at superfast speeds so you really can finish that SKYPE call or that movie download with ZOL Fibroniks.

Designed for the purpose
Copper/ADSL telephone lines were originally designed to take standard voice calls and not cope with the high bandwidth demands of the Internet. This status quo remains. This unfortunately means that copper cables will never be able to keep up with the speeds of ZOL Fibroniks packages. While it is possible to achieve speeds close to that of the ZOL Home Turbo package: You would need to have a few things working for you, these being: You would need to be very close to the exchange and by close I mean – literally less than 100 metres away; in addition to that you would require high quality (expensive) equipment starting with your ADSL router, then the cable itself as well as the ADSL termination equipment. This is a mammoth requirement and task – even in the developed western world finding this structure is rare and expensive.

Fibre on the other hand was designed and engineered very specifically to be able to carry data of very high bandwidth over long distances as efficiently as possible with minimum issues. Backbone cables running under the sea bed operate at phenomenal speeds of Terabits per second, and these speeds are transferrable without changes in cables or infrastructure.

This means ZOL Fibroniks is truly future proof because the same fibres can carry internet at far higher speeds than presently offered which means that we can go faster with little to no adjustment to the installation. Any changes in ZOL Fibroniks do not involve digging up your garden or driveway (again), and for the most part will not require you to buy a new modem either.

Due to the huge capacities of the fibre connection it is now possible to overlay telephone calls on top of your internet service, at the same time; without impacting the other. As a bonus; not only can ZOL Fibroniks customers call each other completely for free but all other calls come at a cheaper rate than the traditional fixed line operator and that is my idea of great value.

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