A.G. Bell Redux - Fibre to the Home (FTTH)
The best conference I've ever attended was back in the 1980's in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in honour of Alexander Graham Bell, who's famous as the inventor of the telephone yet generally overlooked for what he considered his most important discoveries which laid the foundation for fibre optics.
Fibre optics arrived here, today, after a very long wait.
And the difference is dramatic: Download speeds have jumped by 10 times. Upload speeds increase 14 times. But that's just the math.
The Bell conference - by invitation only and including senior players at the Bell Labs, the Canadian Space Agency, the telephone world, National Geographic and so on - wasn't just good. It was shockingly good: slides from deep space never before seen in public, hundreds of amazing National Geographic photos from a half dozen projectors, presentations that talked of developments that would change the world, of historic inventions that already had.
Today, my internet connection went from copper wire to glass fibre.
And it brings closer to fruition a prediction one of the conference attendees - and a great Bell admirer made during lunch one day.
"I live in New York," he said. "And my mother lives in California. With fibre optics, the day will come when we'll be able to sit at the same table for Thanksgiving dinner and I'll be able to see her as clearly as I can see you. There will be a camera at her end, and a camera at ours. And we'll see each other in wall-sized screens. And it will be so realistic, it will be just like being in the same room. Except for one thing: We won't be able to pass the gravy."
- G
