Although Optical Fiber is physically capable of carrying Terabits (!) of data per second, the signaling hardware on the market today is generally limited to no more than a few gigabits of information per second. Optical Fiber is warranted where large amounts of high bandwidth data files are being transferred over long distances.

Fiber is commonly used for:

• Long hauls of a thousand feet or more between buildings or multiple Local Area Networks (LAN), especially in school, university, and business campus settings. Fiber serves as a backbone between hubs that, in turn, branch off to workgroups with hubs and twisted-pair cabling and/or wireless networks.
• High-bandwidth applications like video on demand and multimedia
• Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mbps) networking installations

The beauty of fiber optic cable is that it does not suffer from interference or significant loss of signal over great distances and offers the ultimate in data transit security. Naturally, there is a downside to optical fiber and that is cost. A network utilizing fiber will typically cost twice as much as a CAT6 installation. Although prices appear to be steadily dropping with increased competition among fiber cable manufactures.

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