Angelfire

Angelfire is an Internet venture offering free space for web sites. Angelfire also offered an online email service but this ceased operation in January 2002. In the past, it was long known for providing advertising-free hosting. (It also offered medical transcription services). The site was bought by Mountain View, California-based WhoWhere, which was itself subsequently purchased by the search engine company Lycos. As Lycos already offered web page hosting with advertising through its acquisition of Tripod.com, Angelfire's offering was modified to also have parity with Tripod, including the addition of an increasing amount of ads but also by offering more disk space.

As of 2008, Angelfire continues to operate separately from Tripod and now includes features such as blog building and a photo gallery builder. It also supports, for paid members only, CGI scripts written in Perl. Until May 2004, Angelfire offered free email (as a cobrand of Mailcity) at the @angelfire.com domain, but this feature has been replaced by webmail for premium users only (through Lycos Domains).

Although the Angelfire and Tripod are very much separate sites, they do share much of the same underlying software, such as the blog application. Lycos brands, including both Angelfire and Tripod, were licensed to a company in the UK, which shut them down. The media announced they were shutting down but neglected to note that they were in no way related to their U.S. counterparts, resulting in a January 2009 posting by Lycos.

Fiber Optical Cable

An optical fiber (or fibre) is a glass or plastic fiber that carries light along its length. Fiber optics is the overlap of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of optical fibers. Optical fibers are widely used in fiber-optic communications, which permits transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data rates) than other forms of communications. Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less loss, and they are also immune to electromagnetic interference. Fibers are also used for illumination, and are wrapped in bundles so they can be used to carry images, thus allowing viewing in tight spaces. Specially designed fibers are used for a variety of other applications, including sensors and fiber lasers.

Light is kept in the core of the optical fiber by total internal reflection. This causes the fiber to act as a waveguide. Fibers which support many propagation paths or transverse modes are called multi-mode fibers (MMF), while those which can only support a single mode are called single-mode fibers (SMF). Multi-mode fibers generally have a larger core diameter, and are used for short-distance communication links and for applications where high power must be transmitted. Single-mode fibers are used for most communication links longer than 550 metres (1,800 ft).

Joining lengths of optical fiber is more complex than joining electrical wire or cable. The ends of the fibers must be carefully cleaved, and then spliced together either mechanically or by fusing them together with an electric arc. Special connectors are used to make removable connections.

Cable modem

A cable modem is a type of modem that provides bi-directional data communication via radio frequency channels on a cable television (CATV) infrastructure. Cable modems are primarily used to deliver broadband Internet access in the form of cable Internet, taking advantage of the high bandwidth of a cable television network.

They are commonly deployed in Australia, Europe, and North and South America. In the USA alone there were 22.5 million cable modem users during the first quarter of 2005, up from 17.4 million in the first quarter of 2004.

Modem

Modem (from modulator-demodulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data. Modems can be used over any means of transmitting analog signals, from driven diodes to radio.

The most familiar example is a voiceband modem that turns the digital 1s and 0s of a personal computer into sounds that can be transmitted over the telephone lines of Plain Old Telephone Systems (POTS), and once received on the other side, converts those 1s and 0s back into a form used by a USB, Ethernet, serial, or network connection. Modems are generally classified by the amount of data they can send in a given time, normally measured in bits per second, or "bps". They can also be classified by Baud, the number of times the modem changes its signal state per second.