Originally posted by flynnaus
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The other issue in Oz is the maximum distance between fibre transceivers. Another Oz political giveaway was the development of special fibre cable which massively reduced the total internal reflections to near zero. End result: distance between transceivers could be around 200Kms if I recall correctly. The early "across the Nulla" fibre cable had roughly 10Kms between transceivers. Quite a difference in costs when rolling out over long distances.
Add both of those tech's together and the need for cables as thick as your wrist disappears, as does the tyranny of distance.
Unlike copper, another of fibres strengths is that you cannot detect the signal and / or cable with metal detectors or any such toy. No hostile entity (not that the world has any of those these days...) could detect where the main communication links are buried or do any "wiretapping" (monitoring) with cheap gear. Splicing into large scale fibre cables is tricky, expensive and easily detected. Of course the downside is that any pleb with a digger can nuke an underground cable without realising it. One such idiot took out the entire SW of WA for a few days a while back, completely ignoring the numerous signs on the surface warning of underground cable nearby. Sigh. A certain Telco starting with "T" could not see the point of using a spiderweb layout instead of a straight line with no redundancy. Hopefully NBN learnt that lesson.
The amount of sheer garbage being broadcast via wireless these days is actually affecting a lot of sensitive gear, resulting in things like the square kilometer array telescope finding it difficult to find "RF quiet" areas to operate across the whole planet. Add to that the immense power hunger (due to inefficiency) of wireless (energy crisis, what crisis?) and fibre looks increasingly attractive.
Newer technologies may make all that redundant however the development of the motor car did not remove the need for roads...
TampIt

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