Fiber Optic Cable
An optical fiber cable consists of a center glass core surrounded by several layers of protective material. The outer insulating jacket is made of Teflon or PVC to prevent interference. It is expensive but has higher bandwidth and can transmit data over longer distances.
While coax and twisted-pair cabling carry electronic signals, fiber optics uses light to transmit a signal. Ethernet supports two fiber specifications: • Single mode fiber – consists of a very small glass core, allowing only a single ray or mode of light to travel across it. This greatly reduces the attenuation and dispersion of the light signal, supporting high bandwidth over very long distances, often measured in kilometers. • Multi mode fiber – consists of a larger core, allowing multiple modes of light to traverse it. Multimode suffers from greater dispersion than singlemode, resulting in shorter supported distances. Single mode fiber requires more precise electronics than multimode, and thus is significantly more expensive. Multimode fiber is often used for high-speed connectivity within a data center.
Read more about this topic: Networking Cables
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