“The most important type of media that uses light is an optical fiber. Each fiber consists of a thin strand of glass or plastic encased in a plastic cover. An atypical optical fiber is used for communication in a single direction – one end of the fiber connects to a laser or LED used to transmit light and the other end is connected to a photosensitive device used to detect incoming light. Two cables are used: one for carrying information in each direction.” To put it simply, fiber optic cords are used to move information from one end of the cable to another. A recognizable example of a fiber optic cord is a landline telephone: when we speak into the phone, our voices are picked up by the wire and carried into the wall socket where a different cable then takes our voice to the local telephone exchange.

The first telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. The first cellphone was invented by Martin Cooper in 1973. That means that we were dependent on the fiber optic cables inside Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone for approximately 97 years! For 97 years, we relied on the movement of technology inside the telephone by simple little wires. Fun fact: “each strand that makes up a fiber optic cable is less than a tenth as thick as a human hair and can carry relatively 25,000 telephone calls. So an entire cable can carry something like several million telephone calls.”

Another way that fiber optics have impacted our world and the computer science world is communication between two computers. For information transmission: “you could hook your computer up to a laser, which would convert the electrical information from the computer into a series of light pulses. Then you would fire the laser down the fiber-optic cable. After traveling down the cable, the light beams would emerge at the other end: your friends’ computer.” The only thing your friend would need is a photoelectric cell to turn the light pulses back into electrical information that the computer could understand. This is basically a high tech version of the telephone you make out of two cans and a string!

Additionally, fiber optic cables are the main way of carrying information over great distances because they have 3 advantages over old-style copper cables, which were used previously. The three advantages are less attenuation, no interference and higher bandwidth. “Less attenuation basically means that there is less signal loss when using fiber optics. With no interference, this means that information is transmitted more reliably with better signal quality. As for higher bandwidth, we have seen that fiber optic cables can carry far larger amounts of data than copper cables.”

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits and strong suits of fiber optics, let’s talk about some of the detriments. There have been nearly a dozen instances of internet interruption because of fiber optic cables being cut. This has led to security experts believing that more in depth measures need to be taken “to protect the physical infrastructure that underlies the internet: fiber optic cables.” Attackers are intentionally cutting these fiber optic cables. The cutting of these cables results in the interference or interruption of internet, telephone and television services in several large areas. These cables are being buried several feet underground and span millions of miles along with being in underground vaults with protective sheathing. However, they are marked with orange poles and are unmonitored. Causing interruption can be done by just severing a couple of these fiber optics cables. Ralph Descheneaux of Network Integrity Security states that “You can spend a lot of money on encryption and firewalling, but you also need to cover the basics. At the end of the day, if you don’t protect the actual transport mechanism, you’re always going to have a point of vulnerability.”