2. Applications in high-speed digital networks

A summary of the various existing FOMs was given in the previous section. It is clear that these optical fibers are of particular interest for short-distance transmission (< 1 km), given their modal bandwidth performance, particularly at 850 nm. The best current glass FOMs (OM4) should enable error-free transmission of a high-speed digital signal (e.g. 10 Gbps) over a distance of around 550 m, a distance that is perfectly compatible with the dimensions of an intra-building network ( 16 ). We will see later that this distance remains limited for plastic FOMs (≈ 100 m).