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Hooray for fibre!

Last night was a real fireworks show in the skies over our heads.

Fierce thunder and lightning filled the skies, rattled windows and sent the cats scurrying under the bed.

At one point the lightning was so close that there was no perceptable gap between the flash and the huge clap of thunder that it produced. I suspect it was just a few hundred metres above and directly overhead.

It was at this moment I realised what a fantastic advance "fibre to the home" represents.

Yes, fibre-optic technology now allows me to suck down a gigabit per second of data from the global internet for under $100 a month.

This is a far cry from the old days when was paying over $10 per megabyte (yes, that's per MEGABYTE) for a dial-up internet connection using ancient copper-wire voice circuits.

However, it's not the speed that is the only benefit delivered by fibre.

To elaborate...

I eventually lost track of the number of dial-up modems I lost to the effects of lightning over the years.

Having kilometers of highly conductive copper wire attached to your delicate little modem was always a recipe for disaster when massive burts of electrical current (lightning) was creating huge electromagnetic fields that collapsed at such a rate they induced hundreds or thousands of volts.

Although I always made it my practice to unplug my modems at the first hint of a thunderstorm, there were plenty of occasions when I simply never saw it coming or was too slow to yank that cable. The inevitable result was a dead modem.

Sometimes they just died silently but on at least two occasions there was quite a loud "click" before the little lights on the front panel all went out and, in one case, a small pillar of smoke wafted out of the vent holes.

This just doesn't happen with a fibre connection because the tiny glass thread that connects my ONT (optical network terminal) to the rest of the world is non-conductive. Even the most powerfully collapsing magnetic field has zero effect. No high voltages are induced, no currents flow, no damage is done.

Of course a direct strike on the house might fritz a few devices but since the power cables are buried underground and the data connection is an insulator, mother nature would have to work awfully hard to fry my connection these days.

In fact, I think the "right over my head" bolt of lightning last night was a sure-fire test of the resilience that fibre now offers to such events.

From now on, I shall sleep soundly -- except perhaps for the sound of the anxious cats under the bed, whenever there is a thunder storm

Carpe Diem folks!

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