Nobel Prize Awarded to Fiber-Optic Pioneer [Bit Rate]
The revolutionary telecommunications innovation of fiber optics and its inventor were honored with this year's Nobel Prize for Physics. Charles K. Kao, was director of engineering at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Britain in 1966 when he had the idea of using long strands of glass to transmit light. Kao's vision was to use those light signals to transmit data over miles of glass fiber. However, at the time Kao experimented with the technology in 1966, the glass fibers weren't of a high enough quality to transmit signals more than a few feet.
Kao's innovative ideas spawned an entire industry and ultimately a sea change in telecommunications infrastructure. Developments in fiber optics stretched the distance that signals could be transmitted, leading to the deployment of fiber in networks like Insight's. The invention and deployment of fiber optic networks have made possible today's high-speed Internet connections to our nation's homes and businesses.
According to Todd Spangler's post at on his Bit Rate blog, all the fiber optic cables on the planet have a combined length of 1 billion kilometers, transmitting countless bits of data daily. Congratulations to Charles Kao for his creation of the field of fiber optics and kudos to the Nobel Committee for recognizing this critical contribution to the communications revolution of the Internet.
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