Fibre Optic Cabling

For organisations moving extremely large amounts of data, or if the distance between the network hub and required outlets exceeds 100m, then fibre optic cabling provides a very effective answer. Once very expensive to install, the cost of fibre optic networks has dropped dramatically over the last few years. As the cost of copper continues to rise, it is often a more cost effective answer than large quantities of copper cabling.

Fibre optic cabling allows huge volumes of data to be transferred at high speed. Copper cabling has been the standard for cabling networks over the past twenty years. However, with the great increases in the cost of copper, and the reduction in the production cost of fibre cable, there has been a great shift towards the use of fibre recently. The fact that one fibre cable can easily replace twenty copper cables, plus the increased transmission speeds, makes fibre the new standard for high speed networks.

As with copper cabling, there are different standards, depending upon the application and environment, which are described as Single-Mode and Multi-Mode fibres. One other advantage of fibre optic cabling is that it is unaffected by electrical current, and therefore can run alongside electrics, unlike copper cabling (in most trunking systems, electrical and data cabling runs in different compartments).