Venus Is Just Two Minutes Away, When Fibre is Not Glass, and Unbreakable Wi-fi

Venus Is Just Two Minutes Away, When Fibre is Not Glass, and Unbreakable Wi-fi!

I have an ear for picking up on things that are not quite scientifically correct. So, whenever I hear Journey singing:

We're heading for Venus and still we stand tall
 'Cause maybe they've seen us and welcome us all, yea
 With so many light years to go and things to be found
 (To be found)
 I'm sure that we'll all miss her so

I correct it in my head, knowing that Venus is only two minutes by light. And when I see this advert, I have to say that fibre optic cables are made from glass and not copper:

The technology that Virgin Media use is a coaxial cable, and not fibre. While coaxial cable is fast for our current needs, but it’s not fibre. The actual bandwidth of fibre is many times more than copper cables. In this case, the marketing team perhaps needed to go on a training course in identifying different cable types … “And this is twisted pairs, and this is a fibre cable, and this is coxial cable”. For Virgin Media, perhaps, a slogan of “Boring Old Copper Cables Does The Business, And Squeezes Video and Internet Down The Pipe, In A Way That Is Faster Than You Actually Need, And We Have A Lot of Old Cables Kicking Around”. And, try and do this with a fibre optic cable … it’s gonna break …

And, so BT has released a great new device, and which provides a 4G backup route for wi-fi:

But, “Unbreakable Wi-fi” is not quite correct. It is much more resilient, and could be looking at an average time between outages of years, if not decades, but to say it is unbreakable is not quite correct. Saying that I don’t think that “Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Wi-fi With Alternate Routes” is not quite a zingy advertising slogan. Overall, a great step forward for resilient networks.

Conclusions

If this current time has taught us anything, it is that we need to be resilient. Well done, BT. A great step forward. Like it or not, access to the Internet is now a fundamental requirement in this modern world.