Friday, December 12, 2008

Fiber Types

Multimode fiber can carry multiple light rays (know as modes) at the same time by transmitting each mode at a slightly different reflection angle with the fiber core. Because of dispersion over longer lengths, multimode fiber is used for shorter distances (< 500m).

Multimode fiber has 2 diameter choices. The larger (62.5-micron) core can be used to a length of 175m. The newer 50-micron core is able to extend to 500m Two diameters are used to let one to reuse older fiber optic cable that ran for say FDDI network.

Single-mode fiber has a much thinner core for transmission of 1 mode up to 10 km.

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