There's How Many FIBER CABLES???: Real World Cabling Ep.1 - Keeping IT Simple

fiber optic cabling is one of those things that used its way into the IT industry I mean think about it this cable type has been around since the 1970s but it's only been within the last decade that you started seeing it is like oh hey that that's a fiber cable over there and for a while when I was getting into fiber I'm like oh it's for the fiber guys you know because there's always those guys that come in and take care of the fiber optic cabling but now it's commonplace and now we need to know how to work with it once you get what I'm about to walk you through fiber cabling will be a piece of cake the first thing to catch is that there's two major types of cable out there single mode fiber and multimode fiber you'll see them abbreviated like this in technical documentation when you're buying cables online at the store SMF MMF and one of the things that I love is that the cable manufacturer stayed true to the coloring most of the time the single mode fiber if you're just looking at it hanging from a rack will be yellow whereas multimode fiber will be aqua or orange it makes it really easy to visually identify you can think of multimode fiber as the common man's cable you'll see this in a single building all over the place because it's used typically to connect switches to switches over longer distances you might know that Ethernet cable runs about a hundred meters before you have attenuation whereas this stuff ends up going about 300 to 500 meters at least in the multimode world that variance really depends on the speed that you're trying to run over it ten gigabits per second pushes you closer to the 300 meters whereas one gigabit per second can run a little further single-mode fiber on the other hand is a thin glass core which means it usually takes a little more expertise to work with now I'm not saying that you can't touch one of these cables I'm thinking about when I when I was training a network guy on site I said hope that's single mode fiber and he was carrying it like you know this this small rabbit with a broken leg in his hand he's like I can't ya can't bend it or I can't touch it I mean it's you can see it's it's coiled right there it's not just gonna you know snap on demand by looking at it but it usually takes a little more sophisticated equipment to work with I'll talk about that in just a second these guys are more expensive and go a longer distance to the tune of 10 240 kilometers again depending on how much speed you're sending across this you usually find this cable between buildings like on a college campus or something where you've got a really long distance going between buildings or you'll see the carrier's running single-mode fibre under the streets now the beauty of fiber-optic cable is that you can repeat it limitlessly as the signal begins to fade you can inject a little powered device that regenerates the signal another florida kilometers and farther and farther and farther we go if you want to dig into something really interesting Google transatlantic fiber-optic runs and you start seeing the technology that they use to run fiber-optic cabling across the ocean to connect the continents well my guess is that most of you don't have a wetsuit on and want to stay on the mainland where most network cabling happens so let's talk about the fiber connections big picture first of all we've got buildings right that as they grow larger and larger you move from having a single MDF which is a main distribution facility that's where all of your network equipment is stored and all of your connections terminate into having one or more IDF's that's an intermediate distribution facility because it just becomes disadvantageous to run all the network cabling to one point in the system so you'll install multiple rooms with network switches and that's usually where you see your first fiber optic cable runs is the MDF to IDF connections or when you grow an organization to where they have multiple buildings on the same campus like I think of a college campus and you start saying ok well this building needs a network room obviously we're not going to run all the computers cables in this room back to the MDF and building number one so you'll set up an IDF here right and run fiber optic cabling it through conduit underground to the MDF up here now when I say you'll run that's usually where the fiber specialists come in right you hire a company to come out where they bring spools of cable rather than pre crimped cable if you will and they'll take they're typically single mode fiber and run it from a box like this they'll they'll take one end right here and punch it into the backside of this fiber patch panel and then take this fish it through the conduit and then the other end cut it off and splice it together if you've never seen this in real life canceled the trip to Disneyland Europe can wait go follow a fiber-optic cabling company and watch it it's amazing I'm gonna show you the next best thing well it's sitting on YouTube so go on YouTube and look for a fiber splice so this organization Hamlet's so ok equipment over here this is a fiber splice er usually - - probably twenty thirty thousand dollars for that device depending on how sophisticated it is this he's grabbing it right there is a fiber cutter so it's actually going to cut the fiber optic cable hang on let me let me fast-forward a little bit so an alcohol you know say okay go ahead move hand move okay right there you see it it's as thin as a human hair that's single-mode fiber that he's working with right there so he just went and cut it and he's putting one side of it in the fiber splicing equipment you got to see this and fast forward fast forward okay that's the other side that's the other he wants to join these two fiber optic cables right and I'm telling you I saw this in real life the first time I almost passed out and I'm up you know my legs are getting a little shaky right now so okay man yeah what's he doing so he's put the two pieces in there and he slowly moves them together you know the screen is showing the instruction and it's it gets to a certain point then you let go the cable and the machine takes over where it starts aligning these cables see how they're kind of off a little bit it's like pump up about you hurt at the touch and it moves it up a little higher and then joins it together okay hang on hang on hold your breath oh and that's whoa that was awesome and that you can actually see that I mean you don't actually see lights and fire or anything like that coming out of the device but it joins the two ends of the cable together and it's like a little toaster oven now you've got ace come on fellas awesome now you've got a splice to fiber-optic cable now everything you just saw right there is usually handled by a professional fiber-optic cabling company where they have people that that's all they do is fish fiber cable through conduit and splice it together and their end typically ends right here they run it to the back of the patch panel and network engineers pick up with these connections right and that's where these connect come into play now first and foremost fiber optic cabling is not like Ethernet where it's all bundled together in one cable every fiber run will have a receive and a transmit cable that's brought together in one connection so you see on all these different connector types you see one wire one wire one wire one wire that's the receive and transmit pair now looking at these tips there's none that I would say oh that's the best one there's different best ones for different situations and I'll frankly tell you the best one is whatever the cabling company decided to use on that right there because you have to go by that this is almost always used in a fiber patch panel it's one of the types and that's actually what I would assume is used right there because they have twist lock grips to where you can get a patch panel with or I should say a fiber cable with this end right here that you screw on to the patch panel and that cable will run down and have a different end on the other side such as this that plugs into the switch itself so zooming in you've got your MDF right here if we were to look inside of that room you would have the network rack sitting right here the fiber cable would be run by the professional company into a tray that's typically mounted into the rack at the top or something like that and you take a cable from that patch panel and run it down to your actual switch sitting in that rack so I'm going to take you over to one of my favorite cabling sites where I buy cable from it's monoprice comm and you can see you could go in and buy an LC 2 St patch cable right and there's our lengths 1 meter 2 meters 3 meters and you can see the price goes up slightly yeah all the way down to a 10 meter cable but you can see on one side of the cable are those twistlock connectors and on the other side is this LC connector which usually plugs into the switch itself now you can see down here on the switch that you have these SFP that stands for small or what is a small form pluggable modules that you can go by these and have different kinds of connections for instance there's an Ethernet cable there's the LC these are very popular for plugging into a switch because they're the smallest you'll see some switches that have SC connectors but those are usually the older ones these three types are usually found in patch panels so again you look at the patch panel determine what kind that end needs you go by that to the LC connector which ends up connecting to the switch itself now I'm gonna drop back here I'm just going to click on this fiber-optic cables and you can see there's all of the different times these are the categories right there saying s T to s T multi-mode st 2sc multimode SC I mean you see so they're taking all of these different tips and giving you options of what kind of combinations you have so LC 2 LC are very common because this usually is your switch to switch connections where if you want to connect two switches together and you don't have a patch panel by two lc/ms you see as I scroll down I move from multi mode into single mode fiber and there's all the different connector types that you have over on the left hand side now you know you're saying well Jeremy what about all these ones down here those are weird yeah if they are there's always people trying to develop new standards new ways of doing this that's more efficient that's less problematic for example one of the big problems that you end up with these cables is you have a receive and transmit connection right they end up getting swapped to where receive on one side matches up to receive on another side right and it doesn't work you want receive to match to transmit and transmit to match to receive that's what allows it's kind of like a positive- relationship and allows the devices to talk so one thing that's always happening is these things end up mismatched and so they develop new cable types that say hey you're not going to be able to mismatch these things because it's you know locked into place that being said these connector types are not mainstream at least as I'm talking to you right now they're more proprietary before we leave I want to come back to this slide and address this comment that I'm sure many of you were looking at going what's he talking about I put it on there so I wouldn't forget to tell you and I totally forgot so a fun game is to crack the cable meaning a lot of people wonder well just how much can I bend these things before the fiber-optic cable cracks I would say try it you can see those cables have become commoditized to where it's you know eight bucks for a patch cable from you know monoprice comps to go 12 or 26 so go buy one of those cable or take an old one from the room that you're replacing and Bend this thing you'll find that you can actually bend it pretty far but put it right next to your ear and it goes I started I started passing cables around it when I taught in classroom environments and students would do that and it was this one guy who took the cable and like crumpled it in his hand like a wadded up paper and you would you could actually hear go it was like you know you're like oh man it's like the guy who gets the bubble wrap and jumps on it and pops all the bubbles so no one else can have fun so it's fun to do this because you can see how far you can bend this thing because there's a lot of times you're fishing it through the rack and you're like oh man I know I totally killed it they actually will be able to bend quite a bit

Channel: Viatto

Views: 17,610

Keywords: Fiber Cable, Keeping IT Simple, CCNA, fiber, fiber types, information technology (industry), information technology, it, tech, networking, it jobs, it fundamentals, how to, learn IT, networking tutorial for beginners, home network, CBT Nuggets

Id: J1U8vkmK-hg

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020