Fibers are made from silica glass. A fiber is slightly thicker than a human hair. Because they transmit light, they immune to electromagnetic interference. The transparent fiber core is typically surrounded by the transparent cladding material with a lower index of refraction. Light is propagated inside the core by the phenomenon known as total internal refraction. The fiber acts as a waveguide. The loss of signal can be as low as 0.2dB/km.
A fiber optic Gigabit Ethernet standard for operation over multi-mode fiber using a 770 to 860 nm.
The standard specifies a distance capability between 220 m (62.5/125 µm fiber with low modal bandwidth) and 550 m (50/125 µm fiber with high modal bandwidth).
A fiber optic Gigabit Ethernet standard which uses a long wavelength laser (1,270–1,355 nm), and a maximum RMS spectral width of 4 nm. It is specified to work over a distance of up to 5 km over 10 µm single-mode fiber. It can also run over all common types of multi-mode fiber with a maximum segment length of 550 m.
Similar to 1000BASE-LX but increases the distance to 10km. Used to be called 1000BASE-LX/LH before it became a standard.
Similar the Gigabit Ethernet, the single-mode fibre cables use long-wave lasers to cover distances up to 10km. Multi-mode cables use a short-wave laser (850 nm) for much shorter distances (up to 860m). The bandwidth varies from 100Mb/s to 12,800Mb/s. For more details, see Wikipedia Fibre Channel.
“Long reach” is a port type for single-mode fiber and uses 1310 nm lasers.
“Long Reach Multimode” is a port type for multi-mode fiber and uses 1310 nm lasers. It allows distances up to 220m on FDDI-grade multimode fiber and the same 220m maximum reach on OM1, OM2 and OM3 fiber types.
“Extended reach” is a port type for single-mode fiber and uses 1550 nm lasers. It has a reach of 40 km over engineered links and 30 km over standard links.
10GBASE-LX4 is a port type for multimode fiber and single-mode fiber. It uses four separate laser sources operating at 3.125 Gb/s and coarse WDM with four unique wavelengths around 1310nm. It allows a range of 300m over FDDI-grade, OM1, OM2 and OM3 multi-mode cabling. It also allows a range of 10km over SMF. For MMF links the WDM output needs to be coupled through a SMF offset-launch mode-conditioning patch cord.
Wave Division Multiplexer (WDM) multiplexes multiple signals with different wave-length into the same optical fibre. This allows to better utilize the capacity of the fibre. WDM systems are divided into three different wavelength patterns, normal (WDM), coarse (CWDM) and dense (DWDM). Normal WDM (sometimes called BWDM) uses the two normal wavelengths 1310 and 1550 on one fiber. Coarse WDM provides up to 16 channels across multiple transmission windows of silica fibers. Dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) uses the C-Band (1530nm - 1565nm) transmission window but with denser channel spacing. A typical DWDM system would use 40 channels at 100GHz spacing or 80 channels with 50GHz spacing. Ultra dense WDM technologies are capable of 12.5 GHz spacing. Raman amplification options enable the extension of the usable wavelengths to the L-band (1565 to 1625 nm), more or less doubling these numbers. For more information about WDM see Wikipedia article.