Overview:
Impact of Fiber & Digital Technologies on the Insulated Copper Wire Industry
The battle for supremacy between copper and fiber in telecommunications and data communications continues to increase in complexity rather than becoming more clear. Fiber optics is clearly the superior technology, but the copper-based industries continue to fight back with new digital technologies that squeeze more and more bandwidth out of twisted copper pairs. This report examines in detail these new technologies, which include ADSL, HDSL, VDSL, ISDN, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and CDDI, and determines their effect on the fiber optics market. New fiber optic technologies such as graded-index plastic optical fiber, wave division multiplexing, optical amplification and others are described, and ten-year forecasts are provided for both copper and fiber networking equipment and cabling. Major cablers are profiled, as are vendors of high-speed copper networking equipment. 1996. |
