Comparative analysis of the transmission capabilities of large core plastic optical fibres

In this work we characterize the transmission capabilities of several one millimetre diameter plastic optical fibres (POFs) by analyzing their behaviour at a wavelength in the visible range using a bit error rate (BER) measurement system that allows data rate sweeping. We focus our investigation on transmission data rates in the gigabit range and in-home application distances. The data rate limit for each fibre length extracted from our measurements shows that large core plastic optical fibres are suitable candidates for home and office networks. Moreover, conventional step-index plastic optical fibres (SI-POFs) exhibit error free transmission of Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) data over 25 m, which is a reasonable length for in-home applications. However, only the tested graded-index plastic optical fibre (GI-POF) has been able to transmit GbE data at a 50-m length, which could be extended with a lower attenuation fibre.