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Questions tagged [fiber]

Fiber (Fibre) generally refers to optical fiber, a very thin, flexible glass strand which is used for the transmission of optical signals in high performance networks.

An optical fiber is a very thin, flexible glass strand that transmits light along its axis, by the process of total internal reflection.
There are two main classes of optical fibre used in telecommunications applications, Single-mode Fiber (SMF) and Multi-mode fiber (MMF)

Multi-mode Fiber is mostly used for communication over short distances, such as within a building or on a campus. Typical multimode links have data rates of 10 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s over link lengths of up to 600 meters.

Single mode fiber is used for communication over very long distances. It is not so common in the datacenter environment.

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Does water damage a fiber optic / cat5 cable

One of the buildings I support recently had an adventure with a broken fire sprinkler. Lots of water everywhere. One of the "drains" the water used was the vertical risers between network closets. The cable plant in this building has bundles of…
chris
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Checking fiber cables for light without risking my eyes

I do storage, so I do a lot of fiber. I am also unlucky enough to have a patch panel with single strands, so when someone else does patching for me, it's usually a mystery which of the two strands I'm holding will end up being the tx (send) and…
Basil
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Direct ethernet link between two servers

Say I had two servers which needed super-low latency (Database, file etc.). Would it be possible to directly connect the two servers with 10GbE, so each server had 1 (in the real world it would have 2) connections to the 'main' network, but 1…
Smudge
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Can you run Fiber between two different types of switches?

We are looking into adding a 10g fiber link between two of our locations however we arent sure if its possible. We have an HP Procurve 2910al on one side and an AdTran 1638 on the other and we are looking to go between with single mode fiber. If we…
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Can Fiber optic cables be too short? (dBm too high?)

I have a few switches that are in the same rack that must be connected via fiber OM2, 50/125 MM, LC/LC (2 additional examples added for reference are 10GbE and are OM3). A Verizon tech told me that he had to add attenuators because the laser was too…
Jacob Evans
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connecting remote site via fiber: layer 2 vlans or layer 3 routing?

Greets all, Back in the old days, when you had two geographically separated sites, links were pretty constricted so we put routers on them and, well, 'routed' between ip subnets-per-site. That was best practice at the time. Now we have a fiber…
user52874
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Two identical fiber optic broadband lines working as one

I am looking for a way I could combine two 100Mbit fiber optic lines into a single connection for our office. I assume it involves some Cisco learning or something similar. Do I need to configure some big router to load-balance the NATing in some…
Katafalkas
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Long Gigabit Ethernet Run

I am trying to get an Gig-E network between two buildings that are approximately 260 ft. away. While some TRENDnet switches failed to be able to connect to each other over Cat 6 at that distance, two Netgear 5-port Gig-E switches do so just fine.…
Timothy R. Butler
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10 gigabit networks: Decieding between fiber and twisted pair

With a green field installation 10gbps network (no legacy equipment to support), why would one select one physical medium over the other? If left to impulse, I'd probably go with fiber optics over twisted pair because it is new and exciting. …
Stu Thompson
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LAN Between Buildings

Right now I have two buildings across the street from one another that both have typical consumer aDSL connections (something like 12 Mbs down/1 Mbs up). When I need to access resources on the other network, I VPN into the other building and do my…
mrduclaw
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Are transceivers hot swappable?

Are transceivers in general hot swappable, and if not, how do I find out if these are? Using these adapters 665243-B21, HP Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 560FLR-SFP+ 665249-B21, HP Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 560SFP+ and these transceivers 455883-B21, HP BLc…
Jasmine Lognnes
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Protection while working with fiber optics

As it's dangerous to accidentally look in a fiber optics, what does one normally use as a protection to this while working with fiber optics? Are there safety glasses for such things? How is that problem handled in practice?
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How brittle are fiber cables?

I need to move some fiber patch cables. As they are "special" compared to cat5, I am hesitant to be anything but very careful when moving them. How durable are fiber patch cable? Can I treat it like cat5, or do you have to be more careful?
wd40
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Can gigabit media converters affect performance?

We are looking to upgrade our network infrastructure. We have fiber between our IDFs and our MDF but have found fiber core switches to be significantly more expensive than copper. If we were to have a copper core switch and use media converters to…
obsidian
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What fiber optic network interface card do I need for a WAN connection

I'm thinking on building my own (micro-atx) router for business and personal projects at home. My question is what kind of network card do I need to receive the fiber optic connection? I'm currently using the router my ISP provides me but I want to…
Chazy Chaz
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