Will cat copper cable be replaced by optical fiber?

With the continuous emergence of cloud computing, 5g and other new businesses, the scale of data center continues to expand, its architecture and cabling become more and more complex, and the lightweight and cost of optical fiber reduce, which makes the demand of backbone network equipment for optical fiber more abundant. The proportion of optical fiber in big data center is as high as 70%, far higher than copper cable. Does this mean that copper cable will be completely replaced by optical fiber?

The answer, of course, is No. in terms of the current market situation, optical fiber cannot replace copper cable.

1. In the current market situation, although the price of optical fiber is lower, it is generally higher than that of copper cable; therefore, the wiring and maintenance of copper cable is more convenient and cheaper than optical fiber.

2. In voice signal transmission, copper cable can be used for voice transmission, but optical fiber can‘t. secondly, because the glass fiber used in optical fiber can‘t conduct electricity, copper cable can conduct electricity, copper cable can supply power when data is connected, so it is widely used in wireless access, Poe power supply system, LED power supply system, etc.

3. In tia-568.2-d standard, modular plug connection (MPT 50) It has been approved as an option for connecting equipment, which promotes the application of RJ45 copper cable, especially in the monitoring system using IP camera. Meanwhile, 28 AWG network jumpers are added in the appendix of this specification. The smaller copper cable will help air circulation and space utilization, so that it can be developed in high-density applications.

Nowadays, there are many types of copper cables on the market, such as super five, six, six, seven and eight network jumpers. Different types of copper cables have different wiring applications, as follows:

1. Super class V network jumper

CAT5e network jumper (CAT5e network cable) was developed by TIA / EIA in 2001. It has small attenuation and less crosstalk. The maximum bandwidth is 100MHz, and the maximum transmission rate is 1000mb / s. It is backward compatible. Compared with CAT5e network cable, its performance has been greatly improved, with higher attenuation crosstalk ratio (ACR) and channel noise ratio (SNR), and smaller delay error. Super five types of network jumpers are suitable for 100m and Gigabit Ethernet, which are commonly used in home network or indoor wiring.

2. Category 6 network jumper

The bandwidth of CAT6 network jumper (CAT6 network cable) is 250MHz, and the maximum transmission rate is 10Gb / s. Compared with the super five network jumper, the internal structure of the six network jumper is better, in which the cross skeleton is used internally, and the twisting distance of four pairs of twisted pair is smaller, which improves the performance of the six network jumper in terms of crosstalk and return loss. The transmission performance is much higher than that of the super five network jumper, which is more suitable for applications with transmission rate greater than 1Gbps. In addition, in general, the maximum transmission distance of category VI network jumper is no more than 55m.

3. Super class VI network jumper

Cat6a network patch cord is an improved version of cat6a network patch cord. Its bandwidth is twice that of cat6a network patch cord. The transmission frequency can reach 500MHz and the maximum transmission rate is 10Gb / s. Due to the high quality of the structure of the super category 6 network jumper, which helps to eliminate external crosstalk (AXT), it can support distances up to 100 meters. In addition, compared with the six types of network jumpers, the super six types of network jumpers have thick conductor materials, which are more suitable for industrial environment.

4. Seven types of network jumpers

The transmission frequency of cat7 network jumper (cat7 network cable) is as high as 600MHz, and it supports 10Gbps transmission rate within 100m of transmission distance, which is suitable for 10Gbps Ethernet. Compared with the previous generations of network jumpers, the seven types of network jumpers have strong shielding, which can effectively reduce attenuation, and are suitable for the connection of switches, distribution frames and other equipment in high-density data centers. It is worth mentioning that the transmission rate of seven types of network jumpers can be as high as 40Gbps at the transmission distance of 50m, or even 100gbps at the transmission distance of 15m. At present, because seven kinds of network jumpers are not flexible and easy to manage, they are not popularized temporarily.

5. Class VIII network jumper

Cat8 network jumper (cat8 network cable) is the next generation of twisted pair copper cable standard specified by ANSI / tia-568-c.2-1, which can support up to 2000 MHz bandwidth, and the transmission rate is up to 40 Gb / s, but its maximum transmission distance is only 30 m, so it is generally used for the connection of servers, switches, distribution frames and other equipment in the short distance data center. Because the class 8 network cable is designed for 25gbase-t and 40gbase-t applications, it is especially suitable for data center switch to server interconnection.