Copper will be Replaced by Fiber Optics in Future?

Fiber carries signals with wavelengths much higher than those carried over copper. Concomitantly, the bandwidth of fiber is also much higher, making fiber a preferred (and even, in some cases, necessary) option as data centers struggle to handle increasing traffic loads. Data center study shows fiber outpacing copper by 16 percent and notes that as a recent BSRIA study discovered. Overall in data centers surveyed in 2011 across the six countries, the copper-to-fiber ratio is 42 to 58.

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New copper standards seek to increase the bandwidth of copper cabling, particularly in response to greater bandwidth needs. Fiber provides a number of benefits beyond copper, and these benefits become particularly applicable for new high-speed communications standards, such as 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) and 100GbE. “Most applications are media agnostic—that is, they are supported by a variety of different cable types including copper and either multimode or single-mode fiber. 

40G 850nm 150m QSFP+ SR4 Fiber Optic Transceiver

While copper can be used for many high-speed protocols, the link distances supported by standards are often very short. For example, the latest 40/100GbE standards only incorporate a 7 meter link distance for copper twinax cable, and [unshielded twisted pair] is not a supported media. Multimode fiber, on the other hand, can support 40/100GbE links up to 150 meters, while single-mode fiber can support 10-km link lengths.”

In addition fiber offers a number of other benefits over copper. For example, it is less susceptible to EMI (electromagnetic interference). The optical wavelengths that fiber transmits do not pass easily through the fiber’s cladding; copper, however, can easily pick up unwanted signals unless it is carefully shielded. These characteristics also make fiber a more secure medium. 

The increasing need for security is also driving users to deploy fiber. In fact, it is required for many government applications. Fiber also enables lowed error rates than copper, which is particularly important in storage applications.

Perhaps the main impediment to the adoption of fiber is cost (although other disadvantages may come partly into play). But as data centers move to faster communications standards, fiber will become a virtual necessity. Someone guess that “copper cables have a very limited future in high-performance data centers. New data centers should be entirely based upon fiber; older data centers will need to be retrofitted over time. Fiber cables are a bit pricier, but they will provide significant long-term performance and reliability benefits.”

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