Business Solutions

Matrixlight 10G optic fiber cabling solution

With the falling cost of the Ethernet equipment, 10GBase-T has becomes the prevailing trend in the system

design. Basically, the data transmission rate for horizontal cabling and backbone bears a ratio of 1:10 to avoid

any traffic congestion. Currently, Cat 6 is widely used for the horizontal cabling, which provides 1000Mbps to the

desk. To ensure smooth network traffic, 10G fibre optic cable should be used in backbone. Optic Fibre Cables

becomes the best choice because of its compact size, high transmission capacity and bandwidth. Optic Laser is

mainly of two categories: One is LED using multimode fibre as the transmission media and another is laser using

single mode fibre cable as the transmission media. Single mode cable can certainly fulfill the 10G Ethernet

requirement but the cost of laser equipment is extremely high. Traditional multimode fibre cable can support 10G

application over a short distance of around 50m and may not be adequate for support the backbone traffic. To

support 10G Ethernet application, VCSEL ( Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers) was then developed. VCSEL

combines the strong characteristics of laser including response time, narrow transmission bandwidth and the

special strength of LED such as high coupling efficiency and low equipment cost. Special 50/125um fiber cable is

designed to work in harmony with VCSEL equipment at 850nm wavelength for supporting 10Gbps over 300m

drive distance and 1000Mbps over 900m drive distance. Relatively speaking, the cost of optimized the 50/125um

fiber cable is slightly higher than traditional fiber cable. In June 2002, IEEE approved the new standar for 10G

Ethernet. In September 2002, the ISO/IEC 11801 also standardized a new categorization for the multimode

fiber cables. Under the new categorization, multimode fiber cables are classified under OM1, OM2 and OM3

category. OM1 refers to the traditional 62.5um fiber cables. OM2 refers to the traditional 50um fibre cables and

OM3 refers to the new optimized 50um fiber cables. The bandwidth of traditional 62.5um is only 200Mhz under

850 nm wavelength and 500Mhz under 1300nm wavelength. This bandwidth is far inadequate for supporting

10G Ethernet application. However, with the invention of OM3 fiber cable, 10G Ethernet application can now be

fully supported with OM3 fiber cable which can offer 2000Mhz bandwidth at 850nm wavelength Below is the

bandwidth and the maximum transmission distance of different fiber cables for 10G Ethernet application

Fiber Type Bandwidth 850nm
Mhz*km
Bandwidth
1300nm
Mhz*km
1Gbps Transmission Distance 10Gbps Transmission Distance Fiber Class
Multimode     @850nm @1300nm @850nm @1300nm  
Traditional 62.5/125μm 200 500 275m 550m 33m 300m OM1
Traditional 50/125μm 400 800 500m 1000m 66m 450m OM1
Traditional 50/125/62.5μm 500 500 550m 550m 82m 300m OM2
50/125μm-110 600 1200 750m 2000m 110m 850m OM2+
50/125μm-150 700 500 750m 550m 150m 300m OM2
50/125μm-300 1500 500 1000m 550m 300m 300m OM3
50/125μm-550 3500 500 1000m 550m 550m 550m N.A
Single Mode     @1310m @1550nm 1310/1383/1550nm  
Traditional 9/125μm     5000m   10000m-40000m  

Below are the attenuation and chromatic dispersion values for different fiber types.

    Traditional Single Mode Fiber Zero Water Peak Fiber Non Zero Disperson Shifted Fiber
Long Haul Metro Area
Nominal Attenuation Values ( dB/Km ) 1310nm 0.33 0.34 N/A 0.35
1383nm 0.40 0.31 0.32 0.32
1550nm 0.19 0.19 0.20 0.20
1625nm 0.21 0.21 0.21 0.21
Nominal Chromatic Disperson Values ( dB/Km ) 1310nm 0 0 N/A - 11.5
1550nm 16.5 16.5 4.5 4.5
1625nm 23 23 10.5 8.5

In view of emerging 10G Ethernet requirement, Caledonian put forward 10G fiber solution, MATRIXLIGHT system.

MATRIXLIGHT is a 10G fiber system offering OM3 50/125 fiber cables and single mode fiber cables in full

compliant with IEC 60793-2 and TIA 492AAAC DMD. Working with VCSEL, the OM3 fiber cable can support

10Gbps transmission speed over 300m, complying to ISO/IEC11801-2 nd standard. Caledonian OM3 fiber cable

can support low cost 10G serial transmission technology. In 10G Base-SR, there are two operating bandwidths

One is the 1500/500 Mhz.km and another is 2000Mhz.km, both supporting 850nm light source, and generally

support backbone and fibre to the desk solution. Caledonian OM3 fiber cables works in full harmony with the

fiber patch panels and components in order to support the existing network topology and can be deployed in

either the backbone or horizontal cabling. Lastly, Addison single mode cable features a very low attenuation of

0.7dB/km, which significantly increase the transmission distance from 5 Km supported by 1Gbps to 40 Km

supported by 10G.