Fiber connectors, also called fiber optic cable connectors, are often used to link optical fibers where a connect or disconnect capability is needed. Fiber optic cable connectors come in many configurations and usages, and simplify fiber optic cable installation and maintenance greatly. A number of fiber optic connector types have been evolved and withstood the test of time to become industry standards. Then how many fiber connector types do you know or use? What are the differences between single mode fiber connector and multimode fiber connector? Find details in the following parts.
In the present fiber connector market, there are about 100 fiber optic cable connectors in total. And the most commonly used fiber connector types includes LC, SC, MU, ST, FC, MTRJ, NID, E2000 and MTP/MPO connector. However, no matter what the fiber connector types are, they have the same function and similar basic components—ferrule, connector body and coupling device. And these fiber connectors are widely used in the termination of optical fibers like fiber optic pigtails. Here are five common optical cable connectors.
Developed by Lucent Technologies, the LC fiber optic connector has become the ubiquitous fiber connector for today’s optical telecom applications, especially for connections with SFP and SFP+ fiber transceivers. As one popular SFF (small form factor) connector, LC fiber connector has a ferrule of 1.25mm, which make it perfect for high density cabling. There are single mode LC connector and multimode LC connector. And based on the connector construction, LC connector also can be divided into LC duplex and simplex connector.
Different from LC connector, SC fiber connectors use a round 2.5mm ferrule to hold a single mode fiber (SMF). And it has a “square shaped” connector body, which is the source of name “square connector”. Due to its excellent performance, fiber optic SC connector remains the second most common connector for polarization maintaining applications. SC fiber connector is ideally suited for datacoms and telecoms applications including point to point and passive optical networking.ST fiber connector was created and licensed by AT&T and is still one of the most popular connectors. It has an insertion loss of about 0.25dB and holds the fiber with a ceramic, spring-loaded 2.5mm ferrule that stays in place with a half-twist bayonet mount. ST fiber connector is usually used in both long and short distance applications such as campuses and building multimode fiber applications, corporate network environments and military applications.link