broadband on phoneline

Since the time I was on 56k till now on ADSL, I have experienced problems with my phone line once in a while. The other day my mother was chatting with my grandmother on the phone and suddenly the line went dead. Not very nice between in-laws huh.

Our normal 4-wire phone line was designed for voice, and loading it with broadband and TV and what-not is like asking a beetle to pull a cow. The fact that my housing estate is some 30-40 years old doesn't really help. I think I fried the phone exchange before.

Now broadband should ditch that RJ-11 plug and go with fibre-optics. In many places such as Japan, Korea, Sweden, France and Hong Kong, service providers are laying Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH). You can have the fastest car on the slowest lane. Hello, when are you coming to Singapore, optics cable?

The sexy thing about fibre-optics is, it uses light instead of electricity. A light beam travels faster than the electron, and it can cross each other. (simple experiment, shine 2 torchlights at right angle to each other. See the light?) Try crossing 2 electrical wires, and you got yourself a nice short-circuit. If you can pack as many light beams as the circuits in the size of your Pentium processor, you've got yourself the fastest computer in the world. But the thing is, you need electricity to generate the light for the fibre-optics.