My business is moving to a new location and this calls for new internet service. I am comparing quotes for both fiber optic and coax services from local internet service providers. While researching, I am finding conflicting opinions in regards to speed comparisons. A sales rep has told me that 10mbps DL over fibre is equivalent to 100 mbps DL over cable. That sounds odd to me though. Isn't bandwidth bandwidth regardless of delivery media. I am fine with the QOS on cable and don't doubt fiber wins in that regard. I simply want to compare the speed. Other than mbps, should I be considering other factors? Thank you, stackexchange community!
Fiber Optic vs Cable – How to Compare ISP Speeds
cablefiberlayer1
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You are conflating many things here, so let's try to detangle the issues in your question.
- Data rate is data rate, regardless of the physical medium. A 1Gb connection has the same data rate whether it is fiber or copper.
- As @toddwilcox mentions, the advantages of fiber over copper are longer spans and electromagnetic isolation. Data rates are independent of the medium.
- Transfer rates depend on every link in the chain from source to destination. You can only go as fast as the slowest link. So to determine if a user's transfer rate will increase, you have to consider all of the components from the server to the user's computer.
- You may get a modest performance boost by fixing one bottleneck, but then you will run into another. For example, you may increase your network bandwidth, but you might then be limited by the user PC NIC, disk transfer rate, CPU, etc. The same restrictions may apply to the server too.
- Upgrading one component may require other upgrades too. For example, if you upgrade your network switch to 40Gb, you will need to upgrade your server's connection to take advantage of that.
You mention you get 0.4 Gb "on a good day." Have you tested when only one user is active? If the number is still in the same range, it probably isn't a network problem.
You also don't mention the kind of network equipment you have. Some consumer-grade equipment can have much poorer performance than their port speeds would indicate. In other words, they may have 1Gb ports, but be unable to forward traffic at anywhere near that speed (I should also mention that consumer-grade equipment is off topic on this forum).
Ethernet has been using optical fiber for decades. The first standard was 10 Mbit/s FOIRL in 1987, the currently fastest PHYs run 400 Gbit/s, added in 2017. Fiber has become common in datacenters due to the frequency and reach limitations of copper cables - currently and probably permanently limited to 40 Gbit/s over only 30 m of twisted pair or just 10 Gbit/s over the full 100 m.
Depending on your requirements, you're probably looking for one of these:
- 1000BASE-SX: 1 Gbit/s over up to 550 m of OM2 multi-mode fiber
- 1000BASE-LX: 1 Gbit/s over up to 10 km of single-mode fiber
- 10GBASE-SR: 10 Gbit/s over up to 400 m of OM4 MMF
- 10GBASE-LR: 10 Gbit/s over up to 10 km of SMF
There are many other PHY standards for various data rates and distances, also many common non-standards for even longer distance. The required optical transceivers are usually SFP (1G) or SFP+ modules (10G) plugged into your network hardware. External media converters for devices without SFP slot are also available.
For a complete list of physical layer variants you can check WP.
Best Answer
The sales guy might have meant the latency advantage. Although the capacity (diameter of a tap/pipe for example) is the same, fiber may be able to carry traffic quicker and therefore perform better (water speed in the pipe).