The future-safe path to 40/100 Gb/s cabling with j-fiber Multimode fiber solutions

Advanced data center cabling requires optical fiber solutions that ensure reliable, standard compliant highbandwidth transmission, support long term installation perspectives, consider link length demands, density and cable management factors, and finally help to save costs and space.
The demand for high-speed data transmission and the rapidly increasing number of networked devices ask for fast transition to higher-bandwidth transmission protocols. IEEE standards and definitions support the path to 40 and 100 Gb/s transmission over Ethernet in advanced data centers. Multimode fibers have been evaluated as the medium of choice.
j-fiber supplies cable manufacturers worldwide with high-performance fiber solutions that meet the challenges of advanced LAN, SAN and datacenter cabling, the key domains for advanced Multimode fibers. j-fiber offers a broad portfolio of high-performance OM4 and OM3 standard or bend-insensitive fibers as well as 40/100 Gb/s parallel transmission fiber units based on OM4/OM3 fibers. We thereby support future-safe networks, allowing flexible expansions and moves at best cost-efficiency of optical cable and transceiver components and guaranteed high-bandwidth performance.

j-fiber Multimode fibers respond to the trends in advanced LAN and datacenter cabling

Trend OM4: j-fiber OptiGrade OM4 standard compliant MMF

• The definition of the OM4 standard enabled longer link 10 Gb Ethernet and 16 Gb/s FiberChannel applications and further strengthened the use of Multimode fibers in advanced network installations. Many service providers and data center managers are already using OM4 to extend 10 GbE Multimode applications to distances up to 550 meters. IEEE ultimately adopted OM4 as it is capable of transmitting 40/100 Gb/s over 150 m and thereby support over 97% of all links in data center. With OptiGrade 550 j-fiber has a fully standard compliant OM4 fiber which is also available in the bend-insensitive version as j-BendAble OM4.

Trend parallel optics for 40/100 Gb/sE high-data rate transmission with j-FiberUnit 40 and j-FiberUnit 100

• The current solution of choice for short reach data rate transmission of up to 100 Gb/s is the use of parallel optics. Here the development of high-fiber-count cable technologies supported the use of Multimode fibers for 40 Gb/s Ethernet parallel transmission using a duplex set of 4 OM3 Multimode fibers, each transmitting 10 Gb/s in one cable, while 100 G parallel transmission requires 10 parallel fibers each transmitting 10 G in either a duplex set or two cables. J-fiber has developed low-skew fiber units consisting of OM3 or OM4 pre-selected and bundled fibers which allow transmission of up to 100 Gb/s over 150 m in accordance with the latest IEEE expanded link length objectives for OM4 fibers which now allows to cover 97% of all data center switch-to-switch links.

Trend bend-insensitive fibers: j-BendAble bend-insensitive MMF

• Challenging installation situations might force MMF to withstand tight bending or mechanical impacts which leads to a higher loss of the transmitted light, thus limiting the fiber‘s performance. The approach to bend-insensitive MMF manufacturing is to modify the fiber‘s glass design to keep the light inside the core and minimize signal loss even at small bend radii of 7.5 mm. Bend-insensitive fibers allow better use of limited space or meet challenging installation situations without compromising on performance.