Upgrading Your Fiber Plant to 40 and 100 Gigabit Speeds

-Mark Mullins

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Upgrading Your Fiber Plant to 40 and 100 Gigabit Speeds

Just Now Upgrading to 10 Gig? We Didn't Forget About You

While upgrading backbone cable plants in the LAN to support 10 Gig has been going on for
several years since the release of the 10GBASE-SR standard for fiber, many enterprise businesses did
not previously require these types of speeds, until now.
Data centers are rapidly migrating to 25, 40 and even 100 Gigabit speeds to accommodate an
increasing amount of virtualized servers that host more applications than ever before and vast volumes
of data that needs to be accessed, transmitted and stored. At the same time, the demand for high
speed transmission in the LAN is at an all-time high for both wired and wireless connections.
While many larger enterprise businesses like universities and financial institutions have already
upgraded their LAN backbones, there are still a vast number of others that are just now coming to the
realization that 1 gigabit speeds are no longer adequate.
And with most of the information disseminated now focusing on upgrading fiber plants to
support 40 and 100 gigabit speeds in the data center, we decided that those just now upgrading to 10
gig should not be forgotten and could benefit from revisiting the key considerations.

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Upgrading Your Fiber Plant to 40 and 100 Gigabit Speeds

Cable Matters

When it comes to upgrading to 10 gigabit speeds over fiber, it really comes down to whether
or not the cabling can support it. This has a lot to do with the cable type and the overall channel
length.
In multimode fiber commonly used in LAN backbone infrastructures, signal degradation is
causes by modal dispersion. Modal dispersion results in bit errors caused by light pulses spreading over
distance and arriving at the receiver at different times. This is a limiting factor for high speed
transmission.
Newer fiber types have been specifically designed to inhibit modal dispersion, and legacy
62.5µm multimode fiber is not one of them. Those with this Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI)-
grade fiber are therefore limited to about 26 meters for 10 gigabit speeds--a rather impractical
distance for most LAN backbones that typically require distances closer to 300 meters.
To reach required LAN backbone distances, the cable will therefore have to be upgraded to
laser-optimized 50µm multimode fiber with OM3 supporting 10 gigabit speeds to 300 meters and OM4
supporting 10 gigabit to 400 meters.

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Upgrading Your Fiber Plant to 40 and 100 Gigabit Speeds

Cut Your Losses

In addition to cable type and distances, the key parameter that truly tells us if the backbone
fiber can support 10 gigabit speeds is attenuation. This parameter lets us know how much signal loss can
exist in an end-to-end channel and still have enough signal strength to support the application.
While some installers may have gotten away without calculating attenuations for 1 gigabit
systems, this is not advisable once we move to 10 gigabit speeds. The maximum amount of attenuations
in a 10 gigabit channel has decreased to just 2.6dB (850 nm OM3 fiber) from 3.5dB for 1 gigabit
applications.
Attenuation is a function of many factors--the light source used in the transceivers, the cable
type, the overall channel length, and the number and quality of connections and splices. The number
one contributor to loss and the most common problem preventing the ability to support 10 gigabit
speeds is contamination of the fiber end face.
Telecommunications rooms are not always the cleanest environments, and any dust or debris
trapped between fiber end faces causes signal loss, back reflection and even damaged equipment. So
regardless of the cable type, proper fiber cleaning and inspection have to be a significant part of
ensuring support for 10 gig.
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Upgrading Your Fiber Plant to 40 and 100 Gigabit Speeds

Certified Peace of Mind

Even after you've ensured the right cable type and are convinced that you have abided by the
distance limitations and have done your best to clean and inspect fiber end faces, the only way to be
100% sure that you can support the IEEE 802.3 10GBASE-SR application is to certify the fiber links.
Tier 1 testing using an optical loss test set like the CertiFiber® Pro to measures attenuation is
one method of certification, while Tier 2 testing using an optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) like
the OptiFiber® Pro indicates the attenuation of each component in fiber channel (i.e., cable, connectors
and splices) and events like fiber bends that can also contribute to loss. Without an OTDR, it can be
difficult to identify and fix the specific sources of loss.
For ease of certification, you want a tester that gives you a PASS or FAIL based on the IEEE
application standard, as well as cabling standards specified by TIA and ISO/IEC. A PASS or FAIL indication
is much easier and faster than calculating attenuation or spending hours trying to interpret OTDR traces.
Thankfully both the CertiFiber Pro and OptiFiber Pro provide this indication.

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 Thank You!

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