Broadening fiber market making media converters essential in varied settings

Fiber-optic cabling systems used to have a fairly strong presence in some telecom networks, creating demand for media converters to ensure interoperability between optical infrastructure and Ethernet networks that they attached to. While fairly strong demand for fiber to the home and fiber to the premise has continued fueling fiber deployment in telecom sectors, the markets have evolved and been completed by other sectors. As a result, fiber is becoming much more common in a wide range of settings, creating potential demand for fiber to Ethernet media converters.

Evolving telecom networks
Fiber networks have, in the past, been fairly limited from a construction standpoint. While telecoms had plenty of space to build high-performance infrastructure, fiber-optic cables have been fairly sensitive to bend, making it difficult to install fiber in any area where it would not be deployed in a fairly straight line. This made it difficult, for example, to develop FTTH in multi-family dwellings. The recent rise of bend-insensitive fiber has opened up a new avenue for FTTH and FTTx deployment because fiber can be deployed in a much more diverse range of settings. Consequently, the potential demand for media converters could also increase, as telecoms deploying more fiber will often need to connect that infrastructure to Ethernet networks.

Dealing with performance demands
The ability to install fiber in a wider range of settings is only one contributing factor to the rising demand for fiber. If you look around a few data centers, you may notice that fiber is getting more common. Rising demands in a variety of data center networks is making fiber a key component in the network, creating new demand for advanced architectures.

Furthermore, long-held locations for fiber, such as retail warehouse stores, are still solid targets for optical network deployment.

Let's go mobile
Of course, we now live in a world where it seems like everybody is using a smartphone or other wireless device to access the web. So much for fiber, right? Well, not quite. Mobile networks and high-performance Wi-Fi setups depend heavily on robust backhaul infrastructure. This can add substantially to the need for fiber running from telecom backbones to mobile towers. Again, media conversion is vital in this area as most mobile signal towers depend on copper-based Ethernet within the tower itself.

While network topologies are changing in a wide variety of settings, fiber-optic cabling technologies are playing a central role, making media conversion a vital consideration.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.