I'd be curious to pick your brain. We're looking at running fiber-optic cable underground between our two campuses, and are trying to figure out whether we want to use single-mode or multi-mode fibers.
It seems that either will give us Gigabit today, but that 10G speeds are only currently available at this distance using single-mode. Multi-mode fiber is intended for shorter length connections, though we're *REALLY* close to the 10G on multi-mode fiber (OM4) spec's distance limit, maybe even not quite over. My question is whether this speed limit on multi-mode fiber exists because of an insurmountable quality of the medium or as an artifact of the technology at each end. In other words, this fiber can support 1 Gigabit connections, today. Will it be able someday, due to the progression of technology, to support 10 Gigabit? Or, like 56Kbps on voice modems, or the Fast Ethernet on Cat5 cables, is this a more or less a hard limit imposed by reality? We don't really need 10G now; in fact, the equipment necessary to sun 10Gs over single-mode is so expensive as to not make sense. But we will want it in the future, someday. One reason I'd *like* to go multi-mode is that our existing fiber runs and patch cables are all multi-mode already, but it's not worth consistency/inter-operability to sacrifice the possibility of ever using these fiber for anything faster than Gigabit. The nice thing, I always heard, about fiber optics is that the equipment that connects through it can upgrade speeds without needing to upgrade the cables. It'd be ideal if it were just a matter of time before 10G became cheap and common enough, and the technology got developed to the point of being able to run at such speeds over older/longer fibers. Anyone have the experience/understanding to shed some light on my ignorance? ;-) Thanks ahead of time for your time! Simón _______________________________________________ Fwlug mailing list [email protected] http://mail.fortwaynelug.org/mailman/listinfo/fwlug_fortwaynelug.org This is a public list and all posts are archived publicly. Please keep this in mind before posting.
