- Optical fibre cable technology uses fibres to transmit data.
- The material used for optical fibre is glass or plastic.
- A optic cable consists of bundle of glass threads, each of which is capable of transmitting message modulate into light waves.
- The light in the optic cable travels by total internal reflections.
Design:
- Optical fiber consists of a core and cladding layer selected for total internal reflection due to difference in refractive index between the two materials.
- The total bundle of cable are protected by a layer called buffer which protects the cable from damage due to external force.
Capacity:
- A single optical fiber was able to transfer 1 petabit (1015bits/second).
- Modern fibre cables can contain upto a thousand fibres in a single cable, with potential bandwidth in tetrabytes per second (1000 gigabytes / second).
- There are single mode and multimode optical fibre cables.
Advantages:
- Fibre optics cables have a greater bandwidth than metal cables. They can carry more data.
- They are less succeptable than metal cable to interference.
- They are more thin and light than metal wires.
- Data can be transmitted digitally instead of analogically.
Disadvantages:
- Cables are expensive to install.
- They are more fragile than wire and are difficult to splice.
Notes:
