Today, both fiber and copper have made major advances in bandwidth capability. To support the next generation of LANs at 10 gigabits per second, multimode fiber has advanced to new levels to support laser-based systems. On the other hand, the industry is also developing UTP cabling systems that will provide at least a three-fold increase in bandwidth and compete with fiber in speed (read 10G).

So why not go for copper which is cheaper, and easier to install and maintain?

There are two major advantages of fiber because of which it remains a preferred medium for high-availability applications, and of course, the backbone.

One, as discussed in the article, fiber is immune to electromagnetic and RF interferences. This addresses a big concern of enterprises-data loss.

Two, fiber can traverse longer distances as compared to copper. So in cases where organizations are physically spread over a large area, fiber is the natural choice in the backbone.

Today, fiber is the dominant medium for connecting separate buildings on campuses and connecting floors distributors to building distributors.

However, because of the high cost on the LAN equipment side, fiber has been limited to the backbones. If we compare the cost of a fiber port on the active equipment and that of gigabit copper port on the active equipment, fiber is almost six times higher.

A number of options exist for supporting 10G over different fiber types including single-mode, multimode and laser-optimized multimode fiber. The development of 10GBASE-T will offer an alternative for supporting 10G for distances up to 100 meters. Yet, distances above this will continue to be supported by fiber, as will areas where high density is a requirement.