What Types of Optical Fiber Should I Choose and How Many Fibers?

It may be familiar for you that optical fibers are divided into two different mode which is multimode and single mode.

 

Single mode fiber has a core that is 8.3 microns in diameter. Single-mode fiber requires laser technology for sending and receiving data. With a laser used, light in a single mode fiber also refracts off the fiber cladding. Single-mode has the ability to carry a signal for mile, making it ideal for telephone and cable television on providers.

 

Multimode fiber, as the name suggests, permits the signals to travel in multiple modes, or pathways, along the insides of the glass strand or core. It is available with fiber core diameters of 62.5 and a slightly smaller 50 micron. 62.5 micron multimode is referred to as OM1. 50-micron fiber is referred to as OM2, OM3, and the recently added OM4. OM4 has greater bandwidth than OM3 and OM3 has greater bandwidth than OM2.

 

While single mode fiber has a core that is 8.3 microns in diameter. Single-mode fiber requires laser technology for sending and receiving data. With a laser used, light in a single-mode fiber also refracts off the fiber cladding. Single-mode has the ability to carry a signal for mile, making it ideal for telephone and cable television on providers. 50-micron OM3 fiber is designed to accommodate 10 Gigabit Ethernet up to 300 meters, and OM4 can accommodate it up to 550 meters. Therefore, OM3 and OM4 fiber are always chosen over the other glass types. In fact, nearly 80% of 50-micro fiber sold is OM3 or OM4

 

Except for the fiber mode, the number of fibers is necessary to know. Usually, unless you are making patch cords or hooking up a simple link with two fiber, it is highly recommended that you include a number of spare fibers. Corporate network backbones are often 48 fibers or more. Most backbone cables are hybrids – a mix of 62.5/125 multimode fiber for today’s networks and single-mode fiber for future networks. If the slowest network planned today is as gigabit speeds, it might even be better to use the new 50/125 multimode fiber optimized for the laser sources used in gigabit networks.