Fiber-optic is the choice of all businesses looking to enhance or upgrade their Internet bandwidth. Nearly 2 billion km of optical fiber deployed around the world. It is the backbone of today’s most advanced telecommunication network. Fiber assembled into optical cables that link continence cities and neighborhoods around the world. This thin flexible strand of ultra pure glass is capable of carrying voice, data and video information in the form of light signals at very high speed. Let’s take a closer look at this revolutionary medium of data transmission. Fiber-optic is very thin one strand about the diameter of a human hair. It is comprised of two basic elements made of glass; The core and the cladding. The core is the center part of the fiber is the area through which light signals are transmitted. The cladding layer completely surrounds the core keeping the light from escaping. There are two different types of fibre, single Core and Multimode fiber. Single mode fibers has a small core diameter designed to carry light in a single path over long distances. It has high information carrying capacity and low attenuation and is the most widely deployed optical fibers are in the world. Multimode fiber on the other hand has a larger core which allows light to travel down many paths simultaneously. Typically multimode fiber is deployed in data centres, local area networks and storage area networks where it is more cost-effective than single mode fibers. The three key elements that can limit the speed or the information carrying capacity of the optical fiber are attenuation, dispersion and Bend induced loss in the form of macro bending and micro bending performance. Attenuation refers to signal loss along the length of the fibers. Attenuation can be caused by the quality of the glass itself or can be induced by bending. The dispersion is the distortion of a signal along the fibre length. This occurs because different spectral components of optical signal in fibers travel at different speeds.
Macro bending and micro bending are optical effects that occur when the fibers is bent from a straight axis. Micro bending is an attenuation increase caused by high-frequency small radius bends along the length of the fibers. Macro bending is the attenuation associated with bending or wrapping the fiber. Both of these conditions can allow light to leak out all of fibers meaning some of the original signal is lost. Fibers operate on the principle of total internal reflection which keeps the light within the core and guides it down the length of the fibers. Refraction refers to the bending of light as it passes from one substance to another. The glass used in the fibers code has a higher refractive index than the glass used in the cladding so that the light can be trapped in the core by reflection at the cladding interface as it propagates down the length of the fibers. Fiber Cabling has brought a revolution in the Data Cabling industry. We are truly thankful to the Fiber optic leader Corning and Corning Glass researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz for their amazing invention.