Technology has advanced incredibly rapidly over the last few decades, but in many companies, the cabling infrastructure has unfortunately struggled to keep up. And an inability to transfer data fast enough can hinder competitiveness in some industries – to take one extreme example, look at the attention paid to this issue within the financial trading world – and it will also have an impact on staff and customer satisfaction, as well as rendering some current applications impractical, such as video calls.
That is why so many large companies are now looking to fibre solutions to future-proof their cabling requirements. After all, we don’t know what the data requirements may be in the next 10-20 years, but if the last two decades are anything to go by, innovation in this sector is going to drive them through the roof. So it’s essential to have an advanced cabling infrastructure in place that is equipped to deal with anything the future can throw at it.
Fibre optics are the obvious preference for many businesses over traditional copper wiring for several reasons, but the most prominent is the extra capacity they promise, and the far faster speeds at which they can deliver vital data. With copper wiring, it’s not uncommon to see several companies sharing the cables which may well have been installed a long time ago to handle only phone conversations – ie, they’re not fit for purpose, and slow things down to a rate that is for many companies unacceptable today. A fibre solution is usually dedicated to just the one company.
When it comes to reliability of internet services, fibre also comes out on top. From time to time the performance of copper cabling can be affected by outside interference, for instance if there is a lot of electrical equipment nearby like printers, scanners, servers in an office. Fibre suffers a lot less from this problem.
Speed and uptime, then, are the two largest benefits that fibre brings. Crucial for a business operating in a fast-paced global environment, fibre is ideal for video calls and Cloud applications too, which improve connectivity and productivity among disparate staff.