Om5 optical fiber patch cord: a new cabling scheme for high-speed data center

　　With the surge of data traffic, a variety of emerging services and applications are emerging, and the demand for high bandwidth and high speed in the data center is growing rapidly. It is against this background that om5 fiber has been approved as a new multimode fiber (MMF) for high-speed data center applications. At the same time, om5 optical fiber jumper, which is closely related to it, also began to attract extensive attention in the industry. So, what is the widely concerned om5 fiber patch cord? What is the difference between it and the previous OM3 / OM4 optical fiber jumper?

What is om5 fiber patch cord?

The optical fiber jumper is used as a jumper from the equipment to the optical fiber wiring link. It has a thick protective layer, which is generally used for the connection between optical transceiver and terminal box. It is applied in some fields such as optical fiber communication system, optical fiber access network, optical fiber data transmission and LAN. With the increasing requirements of data center for transmission rate, om5 optical fiber patch cord began to be used more and more.

At first, om5 optical fiber jumper was called broadband multimode optical fiber jumper (wbmmf). It is a new standard for optical fiber jumper defined by TIA and IEC, with a fiber diameter of 50 / 125 μ m。 Compared with other OM3 and OM4 fiber jumpers, om5 fiber jumpers can be used for higher bandwidth applications. Because the manufacturing process of optical fiber preform of om5 optical fiber jumper has been significantly optimized, it can support higher bandwidth.

In terms of structure, it is not significantly different from OM3 and OM4 optical fiber jumpers, so it can be fully backward compatible with traditional OM3 and OM4 multimode optical fiber jumpers. In February 2017, TIA expressly stipulated that the identification color of om5 optical fiber jumper is aqua green, and the outer sheath colors of OM3 and OM4 optical fiber jumper are lake blue and purple respectively. Moreover, OM3 and OM4 optical fiber jumper can still be used with om5 optical fiber jumper. The only difference is that the outer sheath color needs to be changed to easily identify om5 connection.

Three core advantages of om5 fiber patch cord

Om5 fiber patch cord has three core advantages. Firstly, its first advantage lies in its strong scalability. Om5 fiber patch cord can combine short wave division multiplexing (swdm) and parallel transmission technology, and only 8-core broadband multimode fiber (wbmmf) is required to support 200 / 400g Ethernet applications. It has great application potential in the future.

The second advantage is that the use of om5 optical fiber jumper can effectively reduce the construction and operation cost. Om5 optical fiber jumper draws lessons from the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology of single-mode fiber, extends the available wavelength range during network transmission, can support four wavelengths on one core multimode fiber, and reduces the number of fiber cores required to 1 / 4 of the previous one, which greatly reduces the network layout cost and is also one of the fundamental reasons why it is widely recognized.

The third advantage is that om5 optical fiber jumper has obvious advantages in compatibility and interoperability, and can support traditional applications like OM3 optical fiber jumper and OM4 optical fiber jumper. In addition, it is fully compatible with the traditional OM3 and OM4 fiber patch cords, and they have strong interoperability.

Meet the transmission requirements of high-speed data center

Om5 fiber patch cord gives strong vitality to the super large data center. It breaks through the bottleneck of parallel transmission technology and low transmission rate adopted by traditional multimode fiber. It can not only use fewer multi-mode fiber cores to support higher speed network transmission, but also because it adopts lower cost short wave wavelength, the cost and power consumption of optical module will be much lower than that of single-mode fiber using long wave laser light source. Therefore, with the continuous improvement of transmission rate requirements, om5 optical fiber jumper will have broad application prospects in 100g / 400g / 1t super large data centers in the future.

Taking the first generation 400g Ethernet optical fiber wiring in the future as an example, a total of 16 core optical fibers are required for transmitting signals and 16 core optical fibers for receiving signals. A total of 32 core optical fiber multimode optical fibers are required, which means that the data center needs to deploy a 32 core MPO / MTP interface wiring system. Therefore, high cabling costs will inevitably bring great pressure to data center operators.

If om5 optical fiber jumper and short wavelength division multiplexing optical module are used, only 8-core multimode optical fibers are required in total, of which 4-core optical fibers are used to send signals and 4-core optical fibers are used to receive signals. Each optical fiber transmits 4 wavelengths and the transmission rate of each wavelength is 25gbps. Therefore, each core optical fiber of om5 optical fiber jumper can transmit 100gbps data. By adopting this short wave division multiplexing and parallel transmission technology, the wiring cost of the data center will be greatly reduced. It is believed that om5 optical fiber jumper will be widely used in the near future.