The Single-mode Fiber (SMF) is a single strand of glass fiber with core diameter less than 10 microns and has one mode of transmission.
It carries higher bandwidth of data, approximately 50 times more than Multimode Fiber and has speeds up to 25,000 Gbps on paper.
The SMF is more expensive than the Multimode Fiber Optic Cables and requires a light source with a narrow spectral width for propagation.
These are normally used for local area networks.
Multi-mode fiber (MMF) is made of glass fibers with core diameter in the range of 50 to 100 microns and can carry data of more than 5 Gbps, which equals a million megabits.
It meets the bandwidth needs of the new high performance applications such as Streaming Audio/video, Multimedia, and Networking.
The industry has come up with next generation of fiber optic patch cable, 10 Gigabit (10GigE). The 10 Gigabit fiber which has a 50um fiber core and provides nearly 3 times more bandwidth than the conventional 62.5um fiber optic patch cables. It is typically used in installations up to 2000 meters in length.
These are normally used for wide area networks.
