Optical and Electrical Interface Pros and cons!!!!

Hi Friends,

Today i will try to share my experience and learning about optical and electrical interfaces. As in transport we have number of equipments from IP RAN to LRAN and from HRAN to Core which have optical and electrical interfaces. I will try to clear some of the basics doubts regarding the basis difference between them and channel capacity requirement and cost associated with each of them.

1 Basic difference-  As shared in last post when electrical pulses to represent binary 1s and 0s then the interface is electrical interface. Electrical signals need medium to travel like any other pulse . And optical interfaces use pulses of light to represnt the signals as one and zero.

                                       

2. Channel Capacity- As we all know from our engineering subject , when we have less attenuation then S/N ratio is much better , Optical always have good S/N ratio as compared with electrical medium so channel capacity is much larger in case of optical as compared to electrical.

     

3. Cost - Opticals interfaces are costly as compaired with electrical interfaces.

Generally we can say these are the basic differences between the optical and electrical interfaces in terms of very basic terms.

I will share more observation and finding from my experience in transport and main terminology from the RAN and IP networks part.

Br//

Rishabh  

What is an electrical Interface?

Hi,

We as transport engineers have this first things to deal with , optical electrical interfaces, I myself had number of doubts regarding the the actual difference between them.
After my work experience in RAN domain i tried to find the difference between them and there impact in terms of signal to noise ratio and cost requirements.

Electrical Interface- When electrical pulses are used to represent binary 1s and 0s then the interface is electrical interface. Electrical signals need medium to travel like any other pulse, but i case of electrcal from transport part we have medium generally as CAT6 , old thicknet/thinnet coax cables. These cables or mediium has high attenuation as compaired to fibre so channel capacity is gerenally less in terms of electrical signals.As ethernet isn't actually a cable as it's often referred to, it's a data link layer protocol, ethernet networks can be created over different physical mediums.