The optical communication market has developed rapidly in recent years. In order to meet the demand for higher speed and high bandwidth, in many applications, fiber optic patch cords for data centers have replaced copper wire as the mainstream connection device. Many believe that fiber-optic lines can replace it because of their lower latency than copper lines. Some people don't think so, so what's the truth?
Carrier-grade single-mode dual-core fiber optic cable
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1. What is delay?
Literally the latency, it's slow, it's due to the speed limitations of the physical system, the wait time for a signal to get from one place to another, it's divided into types like network latency, audio latency, and WAN latency.
The key factor that affects latency is the signal speed of the transmission medium. Optical fiber and copper wire are two transmission media, and their distance and bandwidth determine when to use them.
2. What is the latency of the fiber?
Since optical fibers are currently used more, let's first look at the delay of optical fibers. The speed of light in vacuum is 3×108m/s, and the speed of light will be slower in air. Therefore, there are five steps to wait when an optical signal propagates in a fiber link: the electrical signal is converted into an optical signal to generate two; the optical signal is generated through a dedicated fiber patch cord for the data center; and the optical signal is converted into an electrical signal to produce two.
3. What is copper wire delay?
The signal quality of copper wire is not as good as that of optical fiber. Especially in long-distance transmission, the signal is easily interrupted by the surrounding environment. The longer the distance, the more severe the attenuation. Often lead to lost clients, page errors, slow users to open and other issues.
Carrier-grade single-mode dual-core fiber optic cable
4. Latency Difference Between Fiber and Copper
Theoretically, the signal is transmitted faster in the copper wire, but in the long-distance demand, the signal processing and repetition requirements are lower, the fiber delay is lower, the copper wire is susceptible to external interference, the loss is large, and the delay is also larger.
In fact, we don't have to delay describing fibers and networks, these are described in terms of distance and speed. Different distances and speed delays are different. For example, serializing a 150-byte packet on a 1.5 Mbps link takes 8 ms, while at 10 Gbps it only takes 1.2 us, with less latency at high speeds.
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