Fibre Optic Cable Performance Single Mode & Multimode

Single mode fibre performance: A typical single mode optical fiber has a core radius of 5-10 micrometers(microns) and a cladding radius of 120 micrometers. Currently, data rates of up to 10 Gigabits/second are possible at distances of over 60 km with commercially available transceivers.

Multi mode fibre performance: Multi-mode optical fiber (multimode fiber or MM fiber) is a type of optical mostly used for communication over shorter distances, e.g. within a building. It can carry 1 Gbit/s for typical building distances. Typical transmission speeds/distances limits are 100 Mbit/s up to 2 km (100BASE-FX), 1 Gbit/s for distances up to 500-600 meters (1000BASE-LX) - single-mode and less often multi-mode, (1000BASE-SX) - multi-mode, and 10 Gbit/s for distances up to 300 meters (10GBASE-SR)

Because the effect of dispersion increases with the length of the fiber, a fiber transmission system is often characterized by its bandwidth-distance product, often expressed in units of MHz ×km. This value is a product of bandwidth and distance because there is a tradeoff between the bandwidth of the signal and the distance it can be carried. For example, a common multimode fiber with bandwidth-distance product of 500 MHz×km could carry a 500 MHz signal for 1 km or a 1000 MHz signal for 0.5 km.

In single-mode fiber systems, both the fiber characteristics and the spectral width of the transmitter contribute to determining the bandwidth-distance product of the system. Typical single-mode systems can sustain transmission distances of 80 to 140 km (50 to 87 miles) between regenerations of the signal. By using an extremely narrow-spectrum laser source, data rates of up to 40 gigabits per second are achieved.

Using Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), the bandwidth carried by a single fiber can be increased into the range of terabits per second. This is accomplished by transmitting many wavelengths at once on the fiber. Wavelength division multiplexors and demultiplexers are used to combine and split up the wavelengths at each end of the link. In coarse WDM (CWDM) only a few wavelengths are used. One use of CWDM is to allow bidirectional communications over one fiber. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) usually involves transmitting and receiving more than eight "windows" of light. Sixteen, 40, and 80 windowed systems are common. Mathematically, 111 windows are possible over a single pair of optical fibers at the wavelengths used today.

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