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Differences Between Optical Fiber and Wireless Communication: Before we try to differentiate between the two let us understand what “Optical Fiber” and “Wireless Connections” mean. It critical to understand the basic of a topic before we dive into anything even remotely related to it, so we will go through both of these communications types in brief.
Let’s start with Optical Fiber,The optical fiber is essentially a long, thin material that is made with pure glass which has the diameter similar to a human hair and it is considered a dielectric waveguide or perhaps a medium using which information such as voice, data or even video can be transmitted in the form of light.
The optical fiber has various applications it is used for telecommunications, imaging optics and endoscope.
Then there is wireless communication,By utilising the electromagnetic waves in open space data is transmitted or received. The information that is to be received by the recipient is sent over a well defined frequency channel. Every single channel has a fixed frequency bandwidth & also a fixed capacity i.e bit rate. A lot of Separate channels can be used to transfer information.Wireless communication application involves mobile phones, broadcasting, WIFI and satellite communications.
Now that we understand what each of these means let’s look into the differences which make each of these unique. you will be able to understand it a lot better once we get into the differences, listed below are three easy ways that will help you grasp the distinctions between the optical fiber and wireless connections.
- Distance
The further away a user is from the broadcast station the weaker the signal gets. Wireless signals tend to degrade with increasing distance between the user and broadcast stations. Whereas an optical fiber doesn’t seem to have that issue. any user who chooses optical fiber will realise that the distance doesn’t matter the person at the shorter distance will get the same service as the one who stays farther away. For isolated places such as villages where getting optical fiber might turn out to be expensive wireless connection might be much more suitable, they are not the perfect solution but the one that the isolated areas have to make do with as setting up a wired optical fiber network might turn out to be too expensive.
- Speed
if we are talking in terms of theory then a wireless network and optical fiber both have same data transfer speed. but in reality, optical fibers are used for getting access to maximum speeds. as most of the wireless networks users share the same bandwidth, the networks start to get congested and it affects the data transfer speed. with an increase in the number of users for wireless connection, the speed is reduced, as the network becomes more congested and that directly affects the speed of the wireless network. The optical fiber has tremendous capacity and can provide faster speeds than you are getting right now. Whenever the company decided to upgrade its other equipment, it’s a given that the optical fiber cables will work beautifully and assist in sending faster messages over the network.
- Mobility
when it comes to mobility hands down wireless communication is the choice to be made, just imagine not being able to leave the place where your connection is at, it will drive you nuts. Today most of the dealings are carried out on smartphone as all of these phones have features that make them a replica of our computers, places like stores and various coffee-shops have given free Internet access to a lot of people and this is possible only because of wireless connections you don’t have to plug in your laptop or mobile devices at these places you get to reap the benefits of free wifi. At some places the wireless connection don’t work, they tend to drop calls and are rarely able to get signals at that time it seems like there are no options and that is actually the case. when the number of users increases the congestion of the network increases just as fast and therefore sometimes you might have to deal with slower internet connections which can affect your productivity or could waste your time when you could have enjoyed using it for better things.
- Installation
setting up an optical fiber connection might turn out to be very expensive and a time-consuming process if the location where you want is in construction phase you might have to get the optical fiber lines build into your building but if you have already had existing lines then you won’t have to worry about the cost, wireless communication looks a lot cheaper in such cases as the setting them up take doesn’t include a lot of time and there are a lot of good choices to select from.
Regardless of the differences both wireless communications and optical fiber are used in multiple places, some of them use both at times. for example, let’s take a cable connection provider, they make use of optical fiber to provide communication channels to your house, but as an owner, you can choose to use a wifi device to share the communication in your own house over various devices.
almost every business today prefer the local area networks it makes communication at workplaces simple but when the employees are on the move they make use of their smartphones or laptops to check their emails which can be done on a wireless network. if you actually get into it, you will realize that you can’t just decide which one is best, let it be optical fiber or wireless connection both of them have their uses, optical fiber might be the perfect choice for one whereas wireless connection might work our better for another purpose, it depends entirely on the need of the individual or organization who is looking into getting a new connection even if you need to have a backup system at a more remote location.
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