What is the difference between coaxial cable and fiber optic cable?

Want to know the difference between coaxial cable and fiber optic cable, first of all to know what is a coaxial cable? What is a fiber optic cable? Let's look at the introduction of coaxial cable and fiber optic cable.

The coaxial cable consists of a hollow metal tube (outer conductor) and a hard copper wire (inner conductor). The inner conductor is located at the center of the metal pipe, and the inner and outer conductors are insulated by a polyethylene plastic gasket. There are three types of coaxial cables used in LANs: 75Ω, 50Ω, and 93Ω. RG59 75Ω cable is the standard cable selected by the shared antenna television system (CATV). It is often used to transmit analog signals generated by frequency division multiple FDM mode. The frequency can reach 300~400MHz, which is called broadband transmission. It can also be used to transmit digital signals. . The 50Ω coaxial cable is divided into two types: thick cable (RG-8 or RG-11) and thin cable (RG-58). The anti-interference performance of the thick cable is good, the transmission interval is far, the price of the thin cable is low, the transmission interval is relatively close, and the transmission rate is generally 10 Mbps, which is suitable for the network. The RG-62 93Ω cable is the coaxial cable selected by Arcnet. It is generally only suitable for baseband transmission, and the transmission rate is 2~20Mbps.

The optical cable is an abbreviation of optical fiber cable, which is a medium for transmitting optical signals, and is composed of a core, a cladding layer and an outer layer of a reinforcing layer of reinforcing strength. The core is made of silica and is made of bismuth, phosphorus and the like, and has a cylindrical shape. The outer bread layer is made of pure silica, which refracts the light signal into the core. The optical fiber is divided into single mode and multimode. The single mode only provides one optical path, and the multimode has multiple optical paths. The single mode fiber has large capacity and is expensive. Now the single mode fiber core has a cladding size of about 8.3 μm/125 μm. The multimode core is commonly used for 62.5 μm / 125 μm. Optical fibers can only be transmitted in one direction. If two-way communication is required, they should be used in pairs. Domestic fiber-optic cable services have now reached 100 Mbps, and service providers have shown that this number will eventually increase to 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps.

The biggest difference between coaxial cable and optical cable lies in the transmission speed. The optical cable is much faster than the coaxial cable. Of course, the optical cable is the fastest transmission medium.