A duplex fiber optic cable consists of two strands of glass or plastic fibers within the same outer jacket of the cable. Generally, duplex fiber optic cables are available in a zip cord construction. Duplex fiber cable is most often used in communication between devices that require the transit and receive signals to the on separate fibers. Hence, instead of running two simplex fiber cables, a single duplex fiber cable can be run. This enables simultaneous bi-directional communication without switching.
Common Duplex Applications:
- Workstations
- Fiber Switches
- Servers
- Fiber Modems
The names simplex and duplex are derived from telecommunication and computer networking terms that describe the flow of information carrying signals. In a simplex channel, information carrying signals travel only in one direction from the transmitter to the receiver. A half-duplex system is essentially a simplex channel that can be switched to go in either direction, but only carry signals traveling in one direction at a time. A full duplex system has two combined channels, generally each channel has a designated direction.
Simplex can be a single mode fiber, or multimode fiber, where multimode fiber is designed to carry multiple light modes. This is not to be confused with simplex and duplex, where duplex fiber may also be multimode. Adding additional modes requires a different fiber construction that ultimately reduces the transmission distance of the cable while also enabling higher data rate transfer.
An example of duplex communication is common telephones (plus a DSL Filter for Phone if you need this as well). Duplex fiber optic cables are commonly used with standard optical transceivers, i.e., SFP, 10G SFP+, 40G QSFP+, and 100G QSFP 28. Duplex fiber may also be used to interconnect/cross connect between fiber optic transceivers and MPO/MTP cassettes if there is a long enough distance between the two devices.
Check out our wide selection of duplex fiber cables.
