Fiber optics, or optical fibers, are long, thin strands of carefully drawn glass about the diameter of a human hair. These strands are arranged in bundles called optical cables. We rely on them to transmit light signals over long distances. At the transmitting source; the light signals are encoded with data… the same data you see on the screen of a computer. So, the optical fiber transmits “data” by light to a receiving end, where the light signal is decoded as data. Therefore, fiber optics is actually a transmission medium – a “pipe” to carry signals over long distances at very high speeds. Fiber optic cables were originally developed in the 1950s for endoscopes. The purpose was to help doctors view the inside of a human patient without major surgery. In the 1960s, telephone engineers found a way to use the same technology to transmit and receive telephone calls at the “speed of light”. That is about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum, but slows to about two-thirds of this speed in a cable.