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WIRED MAGAZINE | MARCH 1999 | MUST READ
FIBER OPTICS Very Local Loop. It's got all the sex appeal of Tupperware - and twice the convenience. University of Pennsylvania physics professor Anthony Garito will soon have you snaking plastic fiber-optic cable along your baseboards, just as you do with speaker wire today. Glass cable consists of several thin fibers - only milli-meters in diameter - inside a larger sleeve. Since light pulses travel faster toward the center than at the circumference, the fiber is specially engineered to ensure data arrives at its destination at one time. Plastic fiber, long dismissed by industry, has tiny imperfections that scatter the light. Garito has found that over short distances, these blemishes slow down pulses and naturally compensate for the irregular speeds. And while plastic is still too impure to send signals across oceans, its pliability makes it ideal for short distances - like those in the home and office. Garito, now in talks with manufacturers, hopes the first products will get to market by early 2000. "We'll be able to buy the stuff at RadioShack," he says, "and wire things up ourselves."
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