You know your mama told you to eat your fiber (for a total digression on grains and nutrition you can check this out http://robbwolf.com/). When dealing with fibre optic cable there are a lot of little details which can make or break your day. Here’s a few things to think about.
– You can’t mix your modes. Single mode and multi mode fibre are completely different beasts which do not connect directly. If you need to bridge single mode and multi mode you can use converter boxes.
– Single mode fibre is 9 microns and essentially focuses down one ray of light. It uses lasers in the wavelength of 1300 or 1550 nanometers. It has a longer range of 10 km or more.
– Multi mode fibre is much larger at 50 microns, sometimes 62.5 microns. The lasers at 850 nm and 1300 nm. Multi mode has a shorter range in the neighborhood of 2 km.
– Know your connectors.
– LC. This is commonly used with multi mode fibre and often found used with networking and audio/video products.
– SC. This connector is probably the most common multi mode connector. You will see this on many rental/staging vendors cable.
– ST. Almost always will be single mode fibre.