1. Fewer fibers to support higher bandwidth applications
OM5 fiber optic patch cable works at 850/1300nm and can support at least 4 wavelengths. OM3 and OM4 usually work at 850nm and 1300nm, which means the traditional OM1, OM2, OM3, OM4 multimode fiber has only one channel, while OM5 has four channels, increasing the transmission capacity by four times. Combining shortwave wavelength division multiplexing (SWDM) and parallel transmission technology, OM5 requires only 8 cores of wideband multimode fiber (WBMMF) to support 200/400G Ethernet applications, greatly reducing the number of fiber cores and largely reducing network cabling costs.
2. Longer transmission distance
The transmission distance of OM5 fiber is longer than that of OM3 and OM4. OM4 fiber is designed to support at least 100 meters in length with 100G-SWDM4 transceivers. But OM5 fiber can support up to 150m length with the same transceiver.
3. Lower fiber loss
OM5 broadband multimode fiber optic cable attenuation from the previous OM3, OM4 cable 3.5 dB / km to 3.0 dB / km, in addition to increasing the bandwidth requirements at 953nm wavelength.
OM5 has the same fiber size as OM3 and OM4, which means that it is fully compatible with OM3 and OM4, so there is no need to change OM5 in existing cabling applications. Therefore, it will be widely used in 100G/400G/1T ultra-large data centers in the future.
