When signals are transmitted over a long distance, single mode fiber patch cable which plays a vital part in the remote telecommunication should not be ignored. Singlemode fiber patch cable is a single strand (most applications use 2 fibers) of glass fiber with a diameter of 8.3 to 10 microns, which only transmits single mode on a given operating wavelength. The dispersion in it is little, so that single mode fiber cable can support Gigabit Ethernet data transfer up to 10 kilometers in distance.
Single mode fiber patch cable which we discussed before is one type of fiber patch cables, and another type is multimode fiber patch cable. Different from single mode fiber patch cable, multimode fiber patch cable can transmit multimode on a given operating wavelength. But what is the main difference between them? And how can we tell them apart?
The main difference between them is the size of their respective cores. Singlemode fiber has a smaller core than multimode’s. As we said before, the diameter of its core is about 8.3 to 10 microns, while the core of multimode fiber is about 50, 62.5 mm or even higher. As a result, the larger core gathers more light in multimode fiber patch cables than single mode cables, and this light reflects off the core and allows more signals to be transmitted. In a word, the size of the cores determines their nature.
Another difference is the transmission distance. Due to the smaller core, single mode fiber patch cable has less signal attenuation than multimode fiber patch cable, so that it can be applied for long distance transmission. On the other hand, although multimode fiber patch cable can transmit multimode, the dispersion between modes is large, which would be a limitation for transmission frequency of digital signals. Therefore, multimode fiber patch cable is usually used for short distance transmission.
According to the different specification, single mode fiber can be divided into different kinds. In the picture below, there are three specifications which defined the single mode fiber. They are IEC (short for International Electrotechnical Commission), ITU (short for International Telecommunication Union) and TIA (short for Telecommunications Industry Association). You can have a visual description from this picture.
In order to help you to have a better understanding of the types of single mode fiber, we will take G.652 for an example. G.652 covers single mode NDSF (non-dispersion-shifted fiber), which has no attenuation coefficient in the 1310 nm range. And low water peak fiber has been specifically processed to reduce the water peak at 1400 nm to allow use in that range.
When put into practice, single mode fiber cable is often connected with connectors to transmit data. For example, LC fiber to ST fiber patch cable is a cable with LC connector on the one end and ST connector on the other end. Also, the connectors to connect the cables have various kinds, such as SC, FC, etc. And if you want to buy these cables with good quality, Fiberstore is a good choice.