You know your business needs a fast, reliable system in order to keep up with the highly technological, ever-changing world of business. But the latest and greatest systems and programs are useless if you don’t have the bandwidth to support them.
To that end, if you’re still using a copper-based service, it’s probably time to look into fiber optics, which use light over glass to transfer data. Made of a very thin thread of glass surrounded in layers of protective coatings, fiber optics provide a much larger amount of bandwidth at longer distances than can copper.
“There are two types of fiber: single-mode, which is for long-distance transmission, typically used for businesses with multiple locations, and multimode, which is for shorter distances, typically used in the same building,” says Dave Elsbernd, a sales engineer for Time Warner Cable Business Class.
Smart Business spoke with Elsbernd about fiber optics and how they can help your business save — and make —more money.
What are the benefits of fiber?
Fiber provides many benefits over traditional copper services. Fiber optics are more scalable than traditional copper services.
There are no limitations to the amount of bandwidth you can transmit over fiber; it is only limited to the type of optics, or laser, that is transmitting the light on the fiber. Typical optics today transmit at one gigabit per second (Gbps) and 10 Gbps, and as technology advances, those speeds will certainly increase.
Fiber optics can be used for a variety of networking protocols other than traditional Ethernet services, such as SONET, which is used for TDM services and Fiber Channel, which is used for storage networking.
Also, because fiber optics cables are made of glass, they are less susceptible than metal cables to interference, and they are much thinner and lighter than metal wires. Data can be transmitted digitally rather than analogically.
Fiber also offers great scalability and reliability. Businesses are able to increase the bandwidth of the fiber without replacing the fiber itself. You would typically only need to replace the optics that transmit the signal on the fiber.
You can also implement a Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) solution over fiber optics to increase the capacity of the fiber. WDM is a technology that allows different frequencies to be transmitted over the fiber at the same time.
