The Benefits of Fiber Cable for Stable and Reliable Broadband Connection

When laying a network cable, which one do you prefer – copper or fiber optic? Both copper twisted pair cables and what is essentially glass or fiber optic cables have their own advantages and unique characteristics. Copper-based networks are already in place in many places and the cost of expanding them is low. However, with the cost of deploying optics dropping sharply, promising fiber optic cable shows more advantages over copper twisted pair and has great prospects in the market of the future.

Bandwidth

While copper is ideal for a voice signal, it has very limited bandwidth, while fiber offers standardized performance up to 10Gbps and beyond.

Fiber optic links provide more than 1000 times the bandwidth of copper and can be more than 100 times longer. The typical product of bandwidth and distance for multimode fiber is 500 MHz/km, so a 500-meter-long cable can transmit 1 GHz. Whereas twisted pairs optimized for high data rates can only transmit 500 MHz over 100 meters. In addition, signal loss over 500 meters in fiber is negligible, and copper has very high losses at high frequencies.

Transmission speed and distance

Optical fiber, compared to data transmission over copper wire, can be viewed as the dependence of the speed of photons on the speed of electrons. Photons travel at the speed of light, while the electrons used in copper travel at less than one percent of the speed of light. Although fiber optic cables do not reach the speed of light, they are only 31% slower. So you can see there is a huge speed difference between fiber and copper. In addition, fiber does not have the 100-meter distance limit of unshielded copper twisted-pair without an amplifier. Thus, distances can range from 550 meters for 10 Gbps multi-mode cable to up to 40 km for single-mode cable.

Reliability

Fiber optic cable is much less affected by various environmental factors than copper cable. For example, copper quality will degrade significantly at a distance of two kilometers, using fiber optic cable at the same distance can provide extremely reliable data transmission. What’s more, fiber is also immune to environmental factors such as temperature and electromagnetic fluctuations – the same cannot be said for copper – you can deploy fiber optic cable near industrial equipment without any problems.

Safety

Since optical fiber does not transmit electricity, it does not emit signals and cannot be connected – copper uses electricity and can be hacked, which can cause the entire system to fail. A broken or damaged optical fiber can be detected very quickly using a number of monitoring methods, including monitoring the actual power transmission or pilot transmission. On the other hand, a copper cable carrying current can completely short out or even start a fire if damaged or frayed without such effective monitoring methods.

The advent of optical cable, with its ever-decreasing cost, increased bandwidth, extremely high speed and long transmission distance, superior reliability, and impeccable security, has replaced copper in all aspects of network transmission and reception.

If you are looking for a reliable broadband connection through optic fiber, visit the Hyperoptic website.

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