If you have ever wondered how you can download information from the Internet so fast or talk to someone anywhere in the world and hear them so clearly, it's mainly because the connection is over fibre optics. You are communicating at the "speed of light."
Basically all communications (phones, the Internet, etc.) depends on fibre optics. Fibre has replaced copper cables, wireless and satellites for worldwide communications links as shown in the photo below. It's a NASA composite photo of the earth at night where lights show the centers of population. Overlaying a map of undersea fibre optic cables shows how they connect the places where the people are.
In the US, cables on the land connect all the population centers, providing the backbone for all phones and the Internet.
US Fiber Networks
Today, fibre is being used to connect homes directly - systems like "Verizon FiOS" and "Google Fiber" use fibre to connect the home with speeds up to 1 gigabit per second - that's one billion bits of data every second, fast enough to download a movie in seconds. The photo below shows a Verizon worker installing fibre to the home in Syracuse, NY.


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