In a recent blog post, Leviton’s senior director of product management for fiber and data center solutions, Gary Bernstein, offers counterpoints to several reasons data centers may choose to install OM5 wideband multimode fiber (WBMMF). “OM5 fiber specifies a wider range of wavelengths between 850 nm and 953 nm,” Bernstein explains. “It was created to support short wavelength division multiplexing (SWDM), which is one of the many new technologies being developed for transmitting 40-Gbit/sec, 100-Gbit/sec, and beyond.”
While the benefits of OM5 and SWDM have been described in several places—including here at cablinginstall.com—Bernstein’s blog post provides technical information that serves as counterpoints to four OM5 value propositions in particular: 1) It offers longer reach than OM4; 2) It will reduce costs; 3) It is required for higher speeds; 4) It will create higher density for switch ports.
We won’t “scoop” Bernstein and the content of his blog post; you can read the post in its entirety here. But in a telling conclusion, he says, “Leviton does not see any good reason to currently recommend OM5 to large data center operators. For enterprise data centers looking at migrating to 40GBase-SR4 or 100GBase-SR4, OM5 offers no additional benefit over OM4 or OM4+.”
OM4+? That must be a topic for another blog post.