Ethernet over Plastic Optical Fibre

A friend of mine had problems operating large plasma cutting machines over a serial link. He was able to solve the problem with a POF link. So the people that make machinery that puts out powerful transients like these plasma arcs, that sort of resemble spark transmitters in a way, they may have solutions and references on their web sites. They would of course also be potential clients if their solutions are not as good as yours.

Now his application was not very high in data rate, but it had to be immune to RFI.

I can see a need for such a link from roof-top antennas to the inside for data, Satlinks, TV programs etc, where you would need to transmit a 2000 (or more) Mhz bandwidth to the application and be able to protect the TV from lightning discharges. This would need to be an integrated double ended solution, fully duplex in some applications.

Plastic fiber optic cable has a very high attenuation loss. Typically 1 dB / meter and a bandwidth of only 5 MHz/ kilometer so is only practical in short runs such as automobiles.

Typical fiber used in the backbone of a local area network uses glass 62.5/125 microns (core/cladding diameter) guided index type multimode fiber with attenuation loss of no more than 3 dB/ kilometer (can be as low as 1 dB loss) and a bandwidth of 500 MHz/km.

For Telecom long haul applications single mode fiber (8/125 microns) is used with attenuation loss around 0.25 dB/km and a bandwidth of 100 terahertz.

Hope this helps rethink your use of POF

Seems to OK to 100 meters for 100MBPS and 50 meters for 250 MBPS

http://www.firecomms.com/downloads/tech%20papers/SIMPLY%20POF%20R1.pdf

The single mode fiber is of fully glass .

The attenuation loss is also dependent of de wavelenght you want to use.

Typical is 1,55µm. The laser or led must also be tuned on these wavelenght of course.

The only dispersions to fear or waveguide dispersion and material dispersion.

Be ware for short bending because this gives scattering outside the fiberlink.

Thanks very much for the replies so far - really appreciate it!