Data Rate vs Length for Fiber Cables

Optical fiber cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
See losses.

Thanks, guys, but no usefull infos there. (I had already taken a look in Wikipedia.)

That's surprising, as it does state a number of bits per second, thereby answering the original post's question.

In which of two links mentioned above???

"Seek and ye shall find." - Anon

Finally, there is a link inside this link (concerning the "multi-mode optical fiber") which gives the infos that I wanted. Thanks.

For most purposes "fiber is fiber", it doesn't care what the transmission mode is, the losses are in the fiber itself, the actual distance will depend upon the power of the transmitter and the sensitivity of the receiver. Over very great distances multiple repeaters will be used to overcome the attenuation of the cable and the inherent distortion of the pulses themselves.

This distortion, which I believe is the actual question you're asking, is orders of magnitude below the loss-figure, i.e., the fiber will go dark long before the pulses distort significantly enough to affect the BER (Bit Error Rate).

That is really not as easy to quantify as one might think. I have not worked with long distance fiber optic communication for a long time but it still seems that the bandwidth limitation is the electronics and optics at the fiber ends and not the fibers and their modes themselves. Consider what I've witnessed over time.

It use to be that a monochromatic LED transmitted the light and a reverse biased light sensitive photo-diode received the light. This set a maximum bandwidth for length many years back that I use to work with. Then modulated lasers pumped more photons into the fiber with more sensitive and faster BJT photo-transistors receiving the light. Single fiber duplex communication have also been done with transceivers at both ends. The input noise at the receivers lead to recent development of prismatic diffraction grating between fiber and receiver. (I'm not sure if this is in production, yet.) Similarly multiple different frequency monochromatic lasers down one fiber with multiple receivers and a prismatic multiple receivers I know are being researched now.