Fiber Optics - Testing the Waters

Hi all

I work for a building automation contractor and we've decided to look into fiber, as some of our Cat 5 runs exceed 300 ft. Another driver for this decision is that we will be implementing BACnet soon. From what I've read, it looks like multi-mode graded index fiber is both cost-effective and offers good performance.

The best signal source option seems to be LEDs as opposed to laser diodes, and the signal detector would be a PIN photodiode.

I'm not clear at all on what type of connectors are most suitable and what equipment I need to terminate them.

We are going to purchase some equipment and bench test it before sendng it out to our field techs. Am I missing anything obvious?

Any words of wisdom?

As you can imagine a net search gives me about 3B hits. I'd like to narrow it down just a bit.

John