Making the Switch to Fiber-Optic Cabling

Ever-increasing numbers of users and devices, coupled with the growing adoption of data-intensive applications, are driving organizations to upgrade their networks. A 10Gb network backbone is no longer adequate for today’s bandwidth demands. Organizations are finding that they need upwards of 100Gb or even 400Gb, both in the data center and campus environments.

That is forcing organizations to consider whether they need to upgrade their cabling plants. Many have copper cabling, and they may be inclined to stick with copper because it’s familiar. The copper industry is trying to keep up by rolling out newer categories of cabling. Cat8 was approved by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) in 2017, and it’s capable of supporting up to 40Gbs speeds and 2GHz of bandwidth for up to 30 meters.

However, organizations need to take a hard look at what their needs are going to be in 10 years. You don’t want to replace your cabling plant every three to five years because you’ve run out of capacity. As demands become greater and greater, it may be more cost-effective to replace copper with fiber instead of a higher category of copper. Cabling is a fairly long-term investment, so organizations need to determine what’s going to give them the greatest bang for their buck. 

Is your organization going to maintain an on-premises data center or push things out to the cloud? Or are you going to have a hybrid environment with some applications in the cloud and some in a colocation environment? Are you going to an edge setup where you decentralize your compute into smaller IDF rooms and network closets that process data near the source and relay it back to the data center? Those are some of the things that will determine what your tolerance for latency will be and what kind of fiber you should invest in.

If you’re an engineering firm that’s investing in high-performance computing, you need to look at next-generation fiber that’s going to provide the most bandwidth for the price. If you’re a law firm and don’t plan on doing any high-density packet transmission, you’re probably safe with today’s standards for the next five or six years without having to worry about upgrading.

Of course, it’s not always easy to predict where you’ll be in 10 years, but there are ways you can engineer your fiber-optic network to maximize your investments. You can invest heavily in your backbone with large counts of single-mode fiber that can stretch over longer distances without relay points. High-fiber-count trunks that can support 100Gb or 400Gb are expensive so you don’t want to be replacing those every few years. But you can spend less money at the edge with OM4 and OM5 fiber cables — those are more easily replaceable because they’re shorter runs, they’re not in the walls and they’re not in the ladder racks. 

Enconnex offers a full range of fiber-optic products, and a large part of our value proposition is custom engineering. We’re able to leverage our manufacturing resources to build what we design. One way we do that is by developing products for hyperscale customers and pushing them out to the enterprise. Single-mode fiber and large-fiber-count trunks are a big part of that.

We also offer a variety of patch panels to meet a wide range of requirements. Do you want a high-density environment that you’re not going to touch very often? In that case, you can go up to 96 ports in 1RU. But if you’re going to be making changes every day, you don’t want it as dense because it’s tough to get your fingers in. We would recommend 24 to 48 ports per 1RU and then scale that through adaptive strips. Our MTP-to-MTP and MTP-to-LC cassettes create a plug-and-play solution.

Enconnex has engineers on staff who can help you design a cabling plant that will suit your needs now and in the future. If you’re looking to upgrade your network, let us help you determine if switching to fiber makes sense, and identify cost-saving strategies that will maximize your investments.