Multimode or Single-Mode Optical Fiber?

Tony Irujo

Cloud computing and web services continue to drive increased bandwidth demand, pushing data communications rates from 10Gb/s to 400Gb/s and beyond in enterprise and data center networks. These higher speeds might lead system designers to believe that singlemode fiber enjoys an increasing advantage over multimode fiber in premises applications. However, higher Ethernet speeds do not automatically mean that singlemode fiber is the right choice. Although singlemode fiber holds advantages in terms of bandwidth and reach for longer distances, multimode fiber easily supports most distances required for enterprise and data center networks, at a cost significantly less than singlemode.