COPPER VS FIBRE
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COPPER VS FIBRE
Traditionally , data centre cabling has been accomplished using copper wire . However , in recent years , as data centres have gotten bigger , more efficient and are required to handle larger and larger amounts of information , fibre optic cable is emerging as a viable alternative . As with most new technologies , fibre has its limitations .
Copper cabling , used to transmit information for more than 100 years , still maintains several advantages . Firstly , they ’ re cheap . Compared to fibre optics , copper can be two to five times less expensive , potentially allowing companies to save millions of dollars in installation costs when spinning up an enterprise scale facility . Another cost-saver is copper ’ s reliability . Passive coaxial copper cabling has a mean time between failures ( MTBF ) of roughly 50mn hours , markedly higher than fibre optics . In terms of speed , over shorter distances , copper performs every bit as well as fibre while consuming less power .
However , the technology has a few drawbacks . “ The basic issue with cables is that , the higher the frequency
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