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One of the best things about fibre broadband

As someone who began their online life using a 300bps acoustically coupled modem, I think I can speak with some authority about how things have improved since the 1980s.

"Back in the day", we had to dial the number of an online service by hand, using a rotary phone (not even any push-buttons) and then, on finding the number was engaged, wait a few seconds and try again.

The result of this was often a sore finger and frustration that the BBSes of the day often only had a single line to service the scores or even hundreds of users that were trying to log on.

Even once you were connected, things didn't get much better.

Three hundred bits per second is about 30 characters per second, an attrociously low rate of data transfer. This meant you'd spend forever just waiting for the sign-on screen and main menu to appear.

As for transferring files, the early protocols were rather crude ones such as XModem and YModem. These were slow and had rather poor error recovery such that you could spend an hour downloading even the smallest program, only to find that noise or some other telephone-line problem saw the transfer aborted at the last block. There was no "resume" option so you'd then have to start from scratch.

Of course as time went on things improved dramatically.

Auto-dialing direct-connect modems offering 1200bps or even 2400bps were a godsend. Now you could let the modem do all the hard work when trying to get through to a busy BBS and transfer rates were blisteringly fast by comparison with the days of the acoustic coupler.

Eventually things got even better and at its peak, the dial-up modem offered speeds of up to 56Kbps, almost rivaling dedicated data serves such as ISDN.

Then the big breakthrough appeared: ADSL.

Suddenly your phone line became two lines; one for data and one for voice.

The minimum download speed with ADSL was usually around 128Kbps, over twice that you could achieve with dial-up and the upload speeds improved as well. Even better, your computer could stay permanently connected to the online world, not just in bursts between voice calls.

Technology continued to evolve and we saw enhancements to ADSL such as VDSL that took speeds even higher, well into the "megabits per second" realm. Unfortunately not all the copper around supported VDSL and you had to be pretty close to a card in the telco network if it was to work at all.

However, now we have fibre and things have improved yet again.

As well as almost a gigabit per second of download and hundreds of Mbps upload, fibre offers a huge benefit that only the old 300bps acousticaly coupled modems of the 1980s offered and one that I value immensely.

I'm talking about electrical isolation.

Why is that important?

Well yesterday, here in the South Waikato, we had some really impressive thunder storms.

Ten millimeter hailstones, torrential rain and some wild lightning strikes made for an exciting spectacle, that's for sure.

In the middle of all this action there was a window of calm when the rain stopped so I took the opportunity to limp into town to buy some provisions and get a bit of exercise. While I was clearing my PO box I glanced towards the part of town where my house is just at the moment there was a humungous bolt of lightening from the dark skies to the ground. It was so bright that it remained etched in my retina for several seconds afterwards and I'm pretty sure I not only heard the thunder just a second later but also felt a puff of wind on my cheek.

People around me actually jumped at the noise and the flash, it was so unexpected and so violent.

It was at that instant I breathed a sigh of relief that I'm connected to the world by a thin strand of glass fibre and not a length of copper wire.

I knew that unless that lightning was a direct strike on my house, my computers would be safe and that my ONT plus my router would be still humming away to themselves when I got home.

That's a far different story to the old days of direct-connect dial-up or ADSL modems. I have honestly lost track of the number of such units I've had fried by lightning over the years. They seemed to be hypersensitive to any level of induced voltage on the phone lines to which they were connected.

"Back in the day" I'd have to unplug my modem(s) at the first hint of thunder and lightning which was fine, except on those occasions when there was simply a bolt out of the blue. Such a discharge would inevitably result in a tiny "click" from the modem and a total failure.

These days I leave everything turned on, even in a really bad storm like the ones we had yesterday. My Siemens 1KVA UPS has a lot of protection against power transients and the data fibre is an excellent insulator such that nothing will be traveling along it except for the light on which my data rides.

Isn't technology great? My 1Gbs fibre connection is every bit as good as my 300bps acoustic modem in terms of voltage isolation and that delivers wonderful peace of mind. In fact, it's one of the best things about fibre broadband.

Carpe Diem folks!

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