Why We Choose Fiber Optic Cable Over Copper Cable?

When installing network cable, fiber optic cable or copper cable, which one do you prefer? Both of them have advantages and specific features. Copper cable has already existed in many places and it is economical in network devices connection. However, with the dramatic reduction of cost of optical deployment, fiber optic cable has become one of the most popular mediums for both new cabling installation and upgrades, including backbone, horizontal, and even desktop applications. There are several advantages which make it a more enticing cable infrastructure solution than its copper counterpart. This passage will present five reasons for the choice in fiber cable instead of copper cable from bandwidth, speed&distance, security, immunity&reliability, and cost.

Bandwidth

Copper cable has very limited bandwidth that is perfect for a voice signal, while fiber cable provides more bandwidth than copper cable and has standardized performance more than 10 Gbps (experimentally car reach to 100 Gbps). More bandwidth means fiber cable can carry more information with greater fidelity than copper cable. For example, cat6a cable is classified by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) to handle a bandwidth up to 600 MHz over 100 meters, which theoretically could carry around 18,000 calls at the same time. By the way, the signal losses over 100 meters in fiber are negligible, but copper has very high losses at high frequencies.

Speed and Distance

Fiber optic transmission versus copper transmission can be boiled down to the speed of photons versus the speed of electrons. Since the fiber optic signal is made of light, which will cause little signal loss during transmission, data can move at higher speeds and greater distances. In addition, fiber does not have the 100-meter (328-ft.) distance limitation of unshielded twisted pair copper (without a booster), so distances can range from 550 meters (928.2-ft.) for 10Gbps multimode to 40 km for single-mode cables.

Security

The data transmitted over the fiber are always safe. Eavesdropping on a LAN using copper cables only requires a sensitive antenna to pick up the energy radiated from the cable. Since fiber optic doesn’t transmit electricity, it won’t radiate energy and cannot be tapped by an antenna, while the copper using electricity is easy to be tapped which will cause the entire system to fail. The optical fiber does not produce EMI, so it cannot catch on fire. Besides, you will not have to worry about replacing fiber cables as frequently as copper cables. Because the fiber core is made of glass, the optical fiber won’t break as easily.

Immunity and Reliability

 

There are a number of factors that can cause outages when an organization is reliant on copper cable-based network, such as temperature fluctuations, severe weather conditions, and moisture. However, fiber cable is completely immune to these environmental factors that makes it extremely reliable in data transmission. What’s more, it is also impervious to electrometric interference (EMI) and radio-frequency interference (RFI), crosstalk, impedance problems and so on. You can apply fiber cable next to industrial equipment without worry.

Cost

A few years ago, the overall price of fiber cables was 100% to 200% higher than copper cables. With the maturity of production technology, the cost for fiber cables, components, and hardware has steadily decreased. Fiber cable is certainly more expensive compared to copper cable when you are looking at it on a short term basis, but cheaper in the long term. Since fiber cable costs less to maintain and needs less networking hardware compared to its copper counterpart.

Summary

With its wide bandwidth, high speed, long distance, great security and reliability, as well as low cost, fiber cable has already replaced the copper cable in many aspects of networking. As fiber optic connectivity improves, fiber construction will become more convenient.