• ladicius@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I work in telecommunication and see fiber quite regularly.

    It really is thin, and fine is a better word. In general what you see is the coating of the fiber, and that already is very fine. The fiber itself is nearly invisible even when you hold a strand between your fingers against the light.

    A single of these nearly invisible fibers can transport a GBit/s into your home. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - yep, Arthur C. Clarke was right.

    • Skua@kbin.earth
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      3 days ago

      Funnily enough I have also worked with them, but all of mine were short lengths so I have absolutely no sense of scale for what kilometres of it looks like rolled up. Or had, I suppose, until now. I just used them to run light into awkward spots for sensors, though, so I wasn’t exactly maxxing out the potential applications

      By a neat coincidence I also play a bit of guitar, and a quarter millimetre is the diameter of the thinnest string on most of mine. For any other guitarists reading, a 10 gauge string is 0.254 mm