The field of fibre optics communications has exploded over the past two decades. Fibre is an integral part of modern day communication infrastructure and can be found along roads, in buildings, on campus, undersea and across deserts.
The fibre itself is a strand of silica based glass, it's dimensions similar to those of a human hair, surrounded by a transparent cladding. Light can be transmitted along the fibre over great distances at very high data rates providing an ideal medium of the transmitted along the fibre over great distances at very high data rates providing an ideal medium for the transport of information.
There are two primary types of fibre. Multimode fibre is very common for short distances and has a core diameter of from 50 to 100 microns. For intercity cabling and highest speed, singlemode fibre with a core diameter of less than 10 microns is used.
So there exists a need for conversion between the types of fibre and between fibre and conventional copper cable, e.g. coaxial and twisted pair.
Fibre services from network providers normally use singlemode type. Here we have an example of a 2Mbit/s service on a fibre being converted (by FC1000) to coaxial copper suitable for a PBX at 2Mbit/s.
The other example is converting singlemode network connection at up to 155Mbit/s, to multimode fibre to connect to a LAN server.