What are the advantages and disadvantages of optical fiber compared with twisted pair?

1, large capacity: the working frequency of optical fiber is 8-9 orders of magnitude higher than that of cable, so the developed capacity is large;

2. Low attenuation: the attenuation per kilometer of optical fiber is more than one order of magnitude lower than that of the communication coaxial cable with the largest capacity at present;

3. Save non-ferrous metals: General communication cables consume a lot of non-ferrous metals such as copper, lead or aluminum. Optical fiber itself is non-metallic, and developing optical fiber communication will save a lot of non-ferrous metals for the country.

4. Convenient capacity expansion: A standard optical fiber dedicated line with a bandwidth of 2Mbps can be easily upgraded to 4M, 100M, 20M, 100 m or even G bandwidth.

Second, shortcomings.

Twisted pair is a kind of flexible communication cable, which contains several pairs of insulated copper wires. It is widely used because of its low price.

Moreover, the price of optical cable is relatively expensive.

Extended data

Optical cable is a new generation of transmission medium. Compared with copper medium, optical fiber has been greatly improved in security, reliability and network performance. In addition, the bandwidth of optical fiber transmission greatly exceeds that of copper cable, and the maximum connection distance supported is more than two kilometers, which is an inevitable choice for building a large-scale network.

Because optical cable has the advantages of good electromagnetic interference resistance, strong confidentiality, high speed and large transmission capacity, its price is relatively expensive.

There are two different types of optical fiber, namely single-mode optical fiber and multimode optical fiber (the so-called "mode" refers to a beam of light entering the optical fiber at a certain angle). Multimode optical fiber is generally used for network connection in the same office building or relatively close area. However, single-mode fiber has higher data quality and longer transmission distance, and is usually used to connect office buildings or geographically dispersed networks.

References:

Baidu encyclopedia-optical fiber