4. Conclusion

This article summarizes the technical characteristics of glass and plastic FOMs available on the telecommunications market. We have shown that they can meet the needs of two major applications: high-speed digital networks and radio-fiber transmission systems.

It appears that the bandwidth performance of glass FOMs is constantly increasing at the two wavelengths traditionally used in optical telecommunications over FOMs. Glass FOM applications are numerous, for distances of the order of a kilometer or less, and digital data rates close to 10 Gbps.

Fluoroplastic FOMs seem to fit into a niche represented by short-distance (≈ 100 m) local/domestic networks. In fact, these fluororesin FOMs offer modal bandwidth performances similar to those obtained on OM2 or even OM3 glass FOMs, but are penalized by their high line loss, which reduces the optical...