Valguskaablid
Both fibers are 125 microns in outside
diameter - a micron is one one-millionth of a meter and 125 microns is 0.005 inches- a bit larger than the typical
human hair. Multimode fiber has light traveling in the core in many rays, called modes. It has a bigger core (almost
always 62.5 microns, but sometimes 50 microns ) and is used with LED sources at wavelengths of 850 and 1300
nm (see below!) for slower local area networks (LANs) and lasers at 850 and 1310 nm for networks running at
gigabits per second or more. Singlemode fiber has a much smaller core, only about 9 microns, so that the light
travels in only one ray. It is used for telephony and CATV with laser sources at 1300 and 1550 nm. Plastic Optical
Fiber (POF) is large core ( about 1mm) fiber that can only be used for short, low speed networks.
Step index multimode was the first fiber design but is too
slow for most uses, due to the dispersion caused by the
different path lengths of the various modes. Step index fiber is