A technician needs to run an optical link between two office buildings that are about 2 kilometres apart. To minimise signal loss and avoid installing repeaters, which type of fiber-optic cable should be chosen for this long-distance connection?
Single-mode fiber has a narrow 8-10 μm core that carries light in a single path, eliminating modal dispersion and allowing the signal to travel many kilometres (often 10 km, 40 km, or even 100 km) before regeneration is required. Multimode, plastic optical fiber, and copper twisted-pair cables all suffer much higher attenuation or dispersion over similar distances, limiting them to a few hundred metres or less. Therefore, single-mode fiber is the appropriate choice for a 2 km inter-building link.
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