New Homes – Digital Networks as Standard!

Imagine buying a new home only to find that your electricity supply only reached as far as your front door and you had to run cables all around you home to power your electrical items; or your water supply was a single standpipe in the kitchen and you had to carry water to other rooms; or you gas supply didn’t reach you cooker.

New Build Home

New Build Home

All these services are seen as essential to the running of a modern home and no one would expect to build a new home without considering how these were distributed and used.

Well now there is another service which is being seen by many to be as essential as the other three – broadband.

The adoption of the Internet and the take up of broadband services by people around the world has been unprecedented and the benefits that this offers has already changed the way people live and it has the potential to make even greater changes in the future.

Add to this the new technology that will be required to manage a modern, environmentally friendly home and the need to link this technology to an operation and control center then you start to realise that the next ‘must have’ in the modern home will be a digital network.

Many people consider that all new homes should be built with a home network already installed and builders are discovering that houses that sport new technology are easier to sell and bring with it a premium price. The future proof home will need to have a digital network at its heart and access to an Internet connection will be an essential part of every room of every home.

The fastest networks are those that run over fibre optics but it has long been considered too expensive and difficult to deploy the industrial, glass type fibre within the home; there are also safety issues with this type of fibre and this has left domestic consumers having to settle for copper cables or wireless systems.

All that may now have changed with the introduction of a plastic optical fibre system called Fibrepoint that has been designed for modern high speed home networks.

Plastic Optical Fibre, or POF as it is known in the industry, is not new, in fact it has been around longer that its glass counterpart. It is used extensively in the motor industry and many high end cars now have POF cables connecting their sophisticated electronic engine management and media systems.

The reason POF has always come second to its glass counterpart is transmission distance. Modern glass fibre optic cables can send digital signal many Km without the need for regeneration but poor old POF can only manage a hundred meters or so. But in the home (or in cars) this restriction is not a problem as most cable runs are no more than about 30 meters. POF is also safe to use and, due to some clever design, easy to install and you don’t need to find a qualified electrician to do the work.

In addition to high speed data transmission, Fibrepoint have incorporated a low voltage DC distribution system that will allow you to run many of today’s digital products and use less power in the process.

Do you want brilliant IPTV?

Alt. (Are you struggling to get the best out of IPTV?)

fibrepoint™, the market leader in Fibre-in-the-Home (FiTH) domestic network solutions, have created a range of products that will allow you to build an amazing home network so you can link together all of today’s incredible technology.

“Why is it important to me and what’s Fibre-in-the-Home?”

Today, your broadband connection is able to provide services that were unheard of only a few years ago. We use e-mail or browse the web and subscribe to social networks like ‘Facebook’ or share our favorite video clips on ‘You Tube’ or watch our favorite TV programs using IPTV ‘i-players’, and all of these services have to squeeze down a copper cable that was originally designed just to deliver your phone.

Today we measure the amount of information we consume in Megabits (Mb) and the number of Mb’s you can send down your connection every second is called the bandwidth. Unfortunately copper cables do not have enough bandwidth for all of today’s internet users so clever people designed a new way of sending all those Mb’s by using light instead of electricity. The light travels down a special fibre made of glass and glass called an optical fibre; optical fibre has the ability to deliver enormous bandwidth.

Telecoms companies have been using optical fibre in their telephone exchanges for many years but now they are laying it all the way to new homes. Unfortunately when it reaches your new home it’s usually converted back into electrical signals and sent down copper cables – the same copper cables that struggle to deliver a good bandwidth.

What’s more important is that copper cables are prone to interference from other electrical items in your house. Hair dryers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and the like create electrical noise and this noise can interfere with your broadband data. That’s not so bad if you are sending an e-mail but if you are watching a TV program live over the internet (IPTV) then electrical noise can cause the picture to break up or even drop out completely – not good when United are about to score that all-important goal.

“OK so why don’t we use glass optical fiber around the home?” I hear you say. The answer is technical but generally speaking, glass optical fibre is difficult to work with and there are health and safety issues. Fortunately there is an alternative – plastic optical fibre or POF.
POF is easy to work with and safe to use.

The Fibrepoint system uses POF to deliver all that bandwidth to all those shiny new electronic devices (and many of the old ones as well).

Welcome to the new digitally connected world.