Fiber Optics Classification

According to the classification standard of different optical fiber, a fiber will have different names.

According to the material of fiber

According to the optical fiber's materials, fiber optics can be divided into quartz fiber and plastic optical fiber.

Quartz optical fiber is generally composed of doped silica core and doped silica cladding. This fiber's dispersion loss is low and moderate. At present, quartz optical fiber is the most common communication optical fiber.

Plastic optical fiber is a new kind of fiber used in communication, is still in the development phase of the trial.

Plastic optical fiber has large loss, coarse core diameter (diameter of 100 ~ 600 μ m), large numerical aperture (NA) (generally 0.3 ~ 0.5) characteristics and lower manufacturing cost. At present, the application of plastic optical fiber is suitable for short length, such as indoor computer networking and communications of ship.

Optical Fiber Classification

According to the optical fiber refractive index profile

According to the optical fiber refractive index profile of different fiber types, can be divided into step type optical fiber and graded index optical fiber.

According to the transmission mode

According to modes of optical transmission, optical fiber can be divided into multimode optical fiber and single mode fiber.

Single mode fiber only can transmit one mode.  Single mode optical fiber only can transmit basic mode (the lowest order mode), without time delay between mode.

Single mode provides much larger bandwidth than multi-mode fiber, which is very important for high code rate transmission.

The mode field diameter of single mode optical fiber is only a few microns (μ m), its bandwidth than the graded index multimode fiber bandwidth is one or two orders of magnitude higher. Therefore, it is applicable to the large capacity, long distance communication

According to the international classification standards (recommended classification according to ITU-T)

In order to make the fiber with uniform international standard, International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) developed a fiber standard (G standard). According to the proposal of ITU-T, fiber optics can be divided into:

1. G.651 fiber (50/125 μ m multimode graded index fiber)
2. G.652 optical fiber (non dispersion shifted fiber)
3. G.653 optical fiber (Dispersion shifted fiber DSF)
4. G.654 optical fiber (cutoff wavelength shift fiber)
5. G.655 optical fiber (non zero dispersion shift fiber)

In order to adapt to the development of new technology, the G.652 fiber has been further divided to G.652A, G.652B, G.652C three sub classes.  G.655 fiber is also further divided into two subclasses of G.655A, G.655B.

Classification according to IEC standards, fiber optics is divided into:

Class A multimode fiber:

1. A1a multimode fiber (50/125 μ m multimode fiber
2. A1b multimode fiber (62.5/125 μ m multimode fiber
3. A1d multimode fiber (100/140 μ m multimode fiber

Class B single mode optical fiber:

1. B1.1 corresponds to the G652 fiber optics
2. B1.3 correspond to the G652C fiber optics
3. B1.2 corresponds to the G654 fiber optics
4. B2 corresponds to the G.653 optical fiber
5. B4 corresponds to the G.655 optical fiber

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