Where can a student get his hands on some fiber optics equipment?

Question

Hi, I'm a computer science student and was able to convince a CDN who has a NOC locally to give me a tour of their facility this last Monday. I thought it was great and might consider network engineering in the future. But I think I'd rather be programming the utilities that run and operate these networks.

Either way, I would love to play with some fiber optics networking. Create an in-house network between machines on different platforms and program them to do stupid things. I'm in a Networking Research lab this summer, but am an undergrad and have a lot to learn about networking. I know equipment is expensive, so that's my problem. I know Cat6 offers similar speeds, but I wanna play with fiber as I believe that's where our future is. Or.. am I wrong?

The University has a public auction on Tuesday and I'll see if I can find anything there. My highest hopes are to at least find some old 10/100MB switches, routers, servers.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Fiber is just the cable, if you really care about fiber, you should do signal processing as part of an Electrical Engineering degree.

If you care about networking as you say, then fiber or cat5/6 are just the 'wire' that carry signal. You shouldn't worry about how they did it, other than they do.