Fiber Optic Cable

Fiber optic cable is used to connect devices to campus networks. It is comprised of microscopic strands of glass, and permits data to travel over longer distances at higher bandwidths than other types of cable.
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Current University Standards
The current standard for fiber optic cable is single mode fiber for interbuilding and intrabuilding core network connections.

Fiber that is not currently connected to active network equipment is considered "dark fiber" and is available for lease by University of Michigan units and their affiliated partners.

For more information about off-campus fiber connections, see our Off-Campus Connections and Fiber Rates pages.

A fiber optic cable network is the gold standard of today’s information age.

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Singlemode 9/125 Fiber Cable
Singlemode 9/125 Fiber Cable »
Indoor / Outdoor
Indoor
Direct Burial
Aerial / Burial In Duct
Figure - 8
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Multimode 50/125 Fiber Cable
Multimode 50/125 Fiber Cable »
Indoor / Outdoor
Indoor
Direct Burial
Aerial / Burial in Duct
Duplex & Simplex Patch Cord Fiber
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UTILITY
A fiber optic cable network is the gold standard of today’s information age. There is no better option than fiber optic cables for high-performance data networking and telecommunications over long distances. The high bandwidth of fiber network cables is required to meet today’s needs for voice/data/video streaming. Discount Low Voltage has a wide selection of fiber optic cables from first-class manufacturers such as Corning and AFL.

AVAILABILITY
You can pick from a huge selection of network fiber cable here. Shop our multimode 62.5/125 fiber cable, single-mode 9/125 fiber cable and multimode 50/125 fiber cable categories. Each type of cable is available as indoor, indoor/outdoor, direct burial or aerial/burial in duct.

The 62.5/125 multimode and 9/125 single-mode options include ALTOS figure-8, gel-free, self-supporting aerial cables designed for easy and economical one-step installation. The loose tube design provides stable performance over a wide temperature range.

Our multimode 50/125 fiber cable provides the performance needed for 10 Gigabit Ethernet or higher. These fiber optic cables are surrounded by strength members and may include a flame-retardant jacket.
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We can supply the fiber cable you need for simplex and duplex patch cords as well. Our indoor/outdoor cabling is compact and lightweight, but doesn’t skimp on performance. All indoor/outdoor models feature a UV-, moisture-, fungus- and water-resistant outer jacket.

Indoor-specific cabling is dense and flexible, perfect for linking up an office network. If you need something for harsh environments or pests, opt for a plenum-armored cable, ideal for manufacturing plants, shipping warehouses and similar environments.

Direct-burial cables serve as campus-wide backbones for voice/data/video and imaging applications. They are UV-, moisture- and fungus-resistant. The gel-free design is optimal for water blocking. Corrugated steel tape armor keeps rodents out.

Aerial/duct burial fiber optic cables are rugged enough for outdoor spaces. Figure-8 configurations are self-supporting aerial cables.
Turnaround time can vary depending on the product, but items we have in stock usually ship within one day of our receipt of your order.

Fiber Optic Cable

Fiber Optic Cable

Bringing Legacy Fiber Optic Cables Up to Speed
A new optics technology boosts data rates on legacy fiber optic cables to 10 gigabits per second
By Jeff Hecht
Cailabs' AROONA device required in the network core for links < 800 m (0.5 miles).
Photo: Atypix

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New Mode of Transmission May Double Fiber Optic Capacity
A screenshot of a software program that has analyzed a fiber optic test network for tiny movements, and produced a blue and green heat map of activity.
fiber certification
Turning the Optical Fiber Network into a Giant Earthquake Sensor
2013 NASA Earth Observatory image showing Bouvet Island, and the ice that covers about 94 percent of the island year round.
The Most Remote Island in the World Is Home to Seals, Seabirds, and an Internet Top-Level Domain
Installing optical fibers with fat cores once seemed like a good idea for local-area or campus data networks. It was easier to couple light into such “multimode” fibers than into the tiny cores of high-capacity “singlemode” fibers used for long-haul networks.

What is fiber optics? We're used to the idea of information

We're used to the idea of information traveling in different ways. When we speak into a landline telephone, a wire cable carries the sounds from our voice into a socket in the wall, where another cable takes it to the local telephone exchange. Cellphones work a different way: they send and receive information using invisible radio waves—a technology called wireless because it uses no cables. Fiber optics works a third way. It sends information coded in a beam of light down a glass or plastic pipe. It was originally developed for endoscopes in the 1950s to help doctors see inside the human body without having to cut it open first. In the 1960s, engineers found a way of using the same technology to transmit telephone calls at the speed of light (normally that's 186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second in a vacuum, but slows to about two thirds this speed in a fiber-optic cable).

Optical technology
Fiber optic cables

Photo: A section of 144-strand fiber-optic cable. Each strand is made of optically pure glass and is thinner than a human hair. Picture by Tech. Sgt. Brian Davidson, courtesy of US Air Force.
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A fiber-optic cable is made up of incredibly thin strands of glass or plastic known as optical fibers; one cable can have as few as two strands or as many as several hundred. Each strand is less than a tenth as thick as a human hair and can carry something like 25,000 telephone calls, so an entire fiber-optic cable can easily carry several million calls.

Fiber-optic cables carry information between two places using entirely optical (light-based) technology. Suppose you wanted to send information from your computer to a friend's house down the street using fiber optics. You could hook your computer up to a laser, which would convert electrical information from the computer into a series of light pulses. Then you'd fire the laser down the fiber-optic cable. After traveling down the cable, the light beams would emerge at the other end. Your friend would need a photoelectric cell (light-detecting component) to turn the pulses of light back into electrical information his or her computer could understand. So the whole apparatus would be like a really neat, hi-tech version of the kind of telephone you can make out of two baked-bean cans and a length of string!

An optical fiber is a thin fiber

An optical fiber is a thin fiber of glass or plastic that can carry light from one end to the other. The study of optical fibers is called fiber optics, which is part of applied science and engineering.

Optical fibers are mainly used in telecommunications, but they are also used for lighting, sensors, toys, and special cameras for seeing inside small spaces. They are sometimes used in medicine to see inside people, like down their throat.

Guiding light by internal reflection, the principle that makes fiber optics possible, was first demonstrated by Daniel Colladon and Jacques Babinet in Paris in the early 1840s. John Tyndall, a physicist, included a demonstration of it in his public lectures in London, 12 years later.[1]

The principle was first used for internal medical examinations by Heinrich Lamm in the 1930s. Modern optical fibers, where the glass fiber is coated with a transparent cladding to offer a more suitable refractive index, appeared later in the decade.[1]

An optical fiber is a thin fiber of glass or plastic that can carry light from one end to the other. The study of optical fibers is called fiber optics, which is part of applied science and engineering.

Optical fibers are mainly used in telecommunications, but they are also used for lighting, sensors, toys, and special cameras for seeing inside small spaces. They are sometimes used in medicine to see inside people, like down their throat.
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Guiding light by internal reflection, the principle that makes fiber optics possible, was first demonstrated by Daniel Colladon and Jacques Babinet in Paris in the early 1840s. John Tyndall, a physicist, included a demonstration of it in his public lectures in London, 12 years later.[1]

The principle was first used for internal medical examinations by Heinrich Lamm in the 1930s. Modern optical fibers, where the glass fiber is coated with a transparent cladding to offer a more suitable refractive index, appeared later in the decade.[1]

For comparison, while single-line, voice-grade copper systems

For comparison, while single-line, voice-grade copper systems longer than a couple of kilometers require in-line signal repeaters for satisfactory performance, it is not unusual for optical systems to go over 100 kilometers (62 mi), with no active or passive processing. Single-mode fiber cables are commonly available in 12 km (7.5 mi) lengths, minimizing the number of splices required over a long cable run. Multi-mode fiber is available in lengths up to 4 km, although industrial standards only mandate 2 km unbroken runs.

In short distance and relatively low bandwidth applications, electrical transmission is often preferred because of its

Lower material cost, where large quantities are not required
Lower cost of transmitters and receivers
Capability to carry electrical power as well as signals (in appropriately designed cables)
Ease of operating transducers in linear mode.
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Optical fibers are more difficult and expensive to splice than electrical conductors. And at higher powers, optical fibers are susceptible to fiber fuse, resulting in catastrophic destruction of the fiber core and damage to transmission components.[44]

Because of these benefits of electrical transmission, optical communication is not common in short box-to-box, backplane, or chip-to-chip applications; however, optical systems on those scales have been demonstrated in the laboratory.

Bandwidth–distance product

Bandwidth–distance product
Because the effect of dispersion increases with the length of the fiber, a fiber transmission system is often characterized by its bandwidth–distance product, usually expressed in units of MHz·km. This value is a product of bandwidth and distance because there is a trade-off between the bandwidth of the signal and the distance over which it can be carried.

For example, a common multi-mode fiber with bandwidth–distance product of 500 MHz·km could carry a 500 MHz signal for 1 km or a 1000 MHz signal for 0.5 km.

Record speeds
Each fiber can carry many independent channels, each using a different wavelength of light (wavelength-division multiplexing). The net data rate (data rate without overhead bytes) per fiber is the per-channel data rate reduced by the forward error correction (FEC) overhead, multiplied by the number of channels (usually up to eighty in commercial dense WDM systems as of 2008).
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Standard fibre cables
The following summarizes the current state-of-the-art research using standard telecoms-grade single-mode, single-solid-core fibre cables.