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by atonse 4036 days ago
How can that ever work? If you're using TCP/IP, you always need to receive an acknowledgement that what you sent actually got to the destination, right?

Or does raw fiber use different protocols?

2 comments

You're right, TCP/IP wouldn't work. UDP would work fine though, as well as anything lower level. You'd just continually send packets at a rate that was slow enough that there'd be no reason that the other side would drop them.

Imagine that the designers want to send information about the plane's expected arrival time to the in-flight entertainment system. You could send a packet once per minute, without any knowledge of whether or not anyone is even listening. If an update is missed, it doesn't matter since the information rapidly becomes stale.

The GP probably means an opto-isolater.

It obviously wouldn't work for carrying something like TCP/IP but rather much lower level signaling.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opto-isolator