Are you planning a new local-area network or upgrade? Under any circumstances, you must ensure that the products you specify can provide the performance and reliability you need. But for more demanding 10 Gigabit Ethernet optical fiber applications, you may want performance beyond what is outlined in "the standards," to provide extra margin for such things as additional connections, higher loss connectors or greater reliability. You can go beyond the standards by specifying fiber with higher bandwidth, and lower loss cables and connectors, all of which provide more power margins to enable greater flexibility in your network design and, ultimately, greater reliability. Get the full story.

OFS will supply nearly $1 million worth of its AllWave® Zero Water Peak (ZWP) optical fiber to Cablemas, one of Mexico's largest CATV providers. AllWave ZWP optical fiber allows transmission in the 1400-nanometer range and consequently can increase the useable wavelength range by as much as half. "With this forward looking technology we can create as much as 50 percent additional bandwidth capacity with the same investment," said Gabriel Gonzalez, Technical Manager of Cablemas. "The installation of AllWave ZWP gives Cablemas a competitive advantage over CATV providers in the area by offering its customers increased bandwidth to improve the customer's experience with triple play services," added Enrique Lopez, OFS Sales Manager, Mexico.

The Fiber Optics LAN Section (FOLS), of which OFS is a member, has released a third-generation interactive cost model for estimating LAN infrastructure costs. The new model takes a broader scope, focusing on the support of converged networks. It also features a simplified user interface to make it easier for users to understand and customize the tool. As with previous generations of the model, the results of the comparisons will depend on the users' unique input. However, when using the sample scenarios, the installed first costs of fiber-based solutions are shown to be either less expensive, or within 5 percent of the installed first costs of the traditional combined fiber backbone and UTP horizontal architecture. The interactive cost model is posted on the FOLS Web site at www.fols.org as a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet.

It depends on the requirements of your system. Since the numerical aperture, group refractive index, attenuation and geometric performance typically are the same for standard 50 µm multimode fiber and laser-optimized OM3 fibers (this is the case for OFS' LaserWave™ Fiber and standard 50 µm fiber), there should be no differences in back reflection or channel insertion loss caused by connecting the two grades of fiber. However, the bit error rate (BER) or transmission capability over a given link length is greatly affected by mixing standard 50 µm with laser-optimized OM3 fiber. In order to determine the maximum 10 Gb/s link length using a combination of standard 50 µm and laser-optimized OM3 fiber, use the equations found on pages 5-6 of our white paper.