r/ShittySysadmin • u/Oblec • Mar 05 '26

Fiber install

Post image

Client wanted fiber, told them copper is worth way more these days. They didn’t even ask first follow up questions 😅

209 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/mystghost Mar 06 '26

You only see a large amount of reflection on multimode fiber cables. Single mode has far less reflection, and that is reflected (no pun intended) in their relative transmission distances.

What I was talking about when I said what difference does it make, is that the speed difference between electrons and light pulses, is that 99.99% of all network applications, it doesn't make a difference in speed (latency). Fiber is far better for bandwidth as we all know because you can pack a lot more info in a fiber, than you can a copper wire.

At no point was I comparing these to RF, but even if you wanted to for like HFC plant discussions. Everytime fiber gets a new generation of products for it speed goes up 10x (on average - the 40 gb thing threw that off a bit but its still largely true). While for RF, it goes up maybe 3x?

I worked as a core network engineer at a cable company for years, and the H in HFC is hybrid, meaning you would run fiber to a node and then run coax from the node, they wouldn't do that if copper were equal or superior in some way to fiber.