Indoor Fiber Cable

Tight-Buffered Cables
Tight-buffered cables are commonly used in indoor network installations where shorter distances or inter-building connections are required. These cables consist of individual fiber strands, each encapsulated in its own protective buffer. The tight buffer layer provides additional protection to each fiber, making the cables more robust and easier to terminate.
One advantage of tight-buffered cables is their flexibility, allowing for easy routing and installation in confined spaces. They are often used in applications such as local area networks (LANs), telecommunication rooms, and data centers. The reliable protection offered by tight-buffered cables makes them suitable for indoor environments where the risk of physical damage is relatively low.

Loose-Tube Cables
Loose-tube cables are designed for longer distance connections and harsher environments. In this type of cable, several fibers are contained within a larger protective tube, leaving room for expansion and contraction due to temperature changes. This design enables loose-tube cables to withstand a greater range of temperatures and provide better moisture resistance.

Duplex Fiber Cable
Dupex fiber calble is composed of two strands of glass or plastic fibers, which can be regarded as two simplex optical cables. Usually, its structure is zipcord. This kind of cable is two-way and synchronous when transmitting data, and is most commonly used for duplex communication between devices that need to send and receive separately. There are two types of duplex fibers, single-mode and multi-mode.

Distribution Fiber Cable
Distribution fiber cables are the most popular indoor optical cables, which are smaller in size and lighter in weight. These cables are used in short, dry pipe, riser and booster applications. Distribution fiber cables are double-buffered and can be terminated directly, but because their optical fibers are not individually reinforced, these optical cables need to be disconnected with a "distribution box" or terminated in a patch panel or junction box to protect a single optical fiber.

Now imagine that the inside surface of the pipe has been coated with a perfect mirror. Now imagine that you are looking into one end of the pipe. Several miles away at the other end, a friend turns on a flashlight and shines it into the pipe. Because the interior of the pipe is a perfect mirror, the flashlight's light will reflect off the sides of the pipe (even though the pipe may curve and twist) and you will see it at the other end. If your friend were to turn the flashlight on and off in a morse code fashion, your friend could communicate with you through the pipe. That is the essence of a Indoor Fiber Cable.

Making a cable out of a mirrored tube would work, but it would be bulky and it would also be hard to coat the interior of the tube with a perfect mirror. A real Indoor Fiber Cable is therefore made out of glass. The glass is incredibly pure so that, even though it is several miles long, light can still make it through. The glass is drawn into a very thin strand, with a thickness comparable to that of a human hair. The glass strand is then coated in two layers of plastic.

By coating the glass in plastic, you get the equivalent of a mirror around the glass strand. This mirror creates total internal reflection, just like a perfect mirror coating on the inside of a tube does. You can experience this sort of reflection with a flashlight and a window in a dark room. If you direct the flashlight through the window at a 90 degree angle, it passes straight through the glass. However, if you shine the flashlight at a very shallow angle (nearly parallel to the glass), the glass will act as a mirror and you will see the beam reflect off the window and hit the wall inside the room. Light traveling through the fiber bounces at shallow angles like this and stays completely within the fiber.

To send telephone conversations through a Indoor Fiber Cable, analog voice signals are translated into digital signals. A laser at one end of the pipe switches on and off to send each bit.