Fiber Optics Essay, Research Paper

Self-study

Edited by: Ty Newman,

Many people try to fit their education into available time slots or their job does not permit them to attend classes on a regular schedule. One of the greatest strengths of distance education is the ability of the student to study at different times as well as in different places. This type of communication is called asynchronous. For these people, asynchronous distance education may offer the only practical opportunity to receive training or education.

Students may share documents with each other and hand in assignments to instructors by attaching them to electronic mail. They may confer face-to-face using programs like Microsoft’s NetMeeting, which also allows the students to share software applications and receive help from instructors one-on-one. Students can view recorded lectures and slide shows at their own pace from audio/video streaming format servers such as Microsoft’s NetShow. Students can also take part in asynchronous online conference groups where each student responds to a posted question.

Anticipated Increases in Transmission Speed.

One of the founders of Intel developed what is now known as Moore’s Law. He predicted that the computing power that you could buy for a dollar would double each year and a half. In many cases, his prediction has been conservative. If you are making plans for using computer technology to provide training at a distance during the next three years, you should anticipate that the available speed and power of computers would increase by at least a factor of four.

Data transmission rates from homes are increasing at an even faster pace. Three years ago a 9600 bits per second (0.0096 megabits per second) modem was considered fast. Now 56,000 bits per second (0.0560 megabits per second) modems are available. The telephone companies offer a special higher speed phone service known as ISDN, with data rates of 0.128 megabits per second. But it requires installation of two phone lines and special switchgear. I expect that ISDN will be bypassed by a newer technology now being tested called ADSL, which stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. This is a system that uses existing telephone lines in a new way and has the potential of transmitting data at rates between 0.8 megabits per second upload and 9 megabits per second download. The obvious advantage of this type of system is that it could be available wherever there is telephone service. It is currently being tested in over two dozen cities. For more information, look at the ADSL Web site on the Internet at http://www.adsl.com.

The cable television companies are aggressively developing high-speed communication technologies for two-way transmission of data over their cable. Cable modems are being tested now that can provide access to the Internet at up to 30 megabits per second. (Cable modems share the available transmission rate with the number of users who are on that loop and may vary considerably depending on usage.) At this transmission rate, it should be possible to provide reasonably good quality two-way video that could be used for training and instruction.