Data Cabling — Copper Vs Fibre Optic
In this digital age, you will be hard pressed to run your business without an internet connection. So it is unsurprising that data cabling services are highly sought after as every business owner seeks to increase the productivity of their staff and the bottom line of their business. When you start deliberating on cabling installation, you have the choice of fibre-optic cabling and copper cabling.
Fibre-optic cabling is the latest entrant in the market and provides you with fast, network connections. Copper cabling, despite its prevalence, is inferior. Here are some of the reasons why you should avoid it when installing data cabling for your business.
Copper cabling degrades faster than fibre-optic cabling
Copper, despite being used in a host of industries, is a metal that will eventually corrode down the road. Thus, when you are considering data cabling for your business, you need to keep in mind that copper will have a shorter lifespan as compared to fibre-optic cabling. In addition to the short lifespan, copper cabling is also vulnerable to poor signals due to degradation. As a result, your business' productivity can be jeopardised due to downtime and other problems with the performance of your network.
Fibre-optic cabling, on the other hand, is rust and weather resistant, which means your cabling will have a long lifespan. Moreover, signal degradation is never a problem you have to worry about with fibre-optic cabling since it is not susceptible to interference from external factors.
Copper cabling is affected by electrical interference
Another reason why you should lean toward fibre-optic cabling over copper is that the latter is vulnerable to electrical interference. Copper cabling is very sensitive to electrical waves from electrical conduits, smartphones, computers and so on. When the cabling picks up these waves, it manifests as corrupted data and interference on VoIP calls.
Another risk that copper cabling poses is that the way it picks up the noise from conduits makes it easy to tap into the copper cabling network. Therefore, when you choose this type of data cabling, you could be putting your company's secrets at risk of falling into the hands of the competition, which could be a huge blow to your business.
Fibre-optic cabling, conversely, is not affected by electromagnetic waves since it is a non-metallic material. Therefore, if you want to avoid EMR issues, chumming noises and shorting of cables, you should choose fibre-optic data cabling for your business.