Things You Should Know About Fiber Optic Pigtail

A fiber patch cord is a length of fiber cable fitted with LC, SC, MTRJ or ST connectors at each end. Fiber jumpers also come in hybrid varieties with one type of connector on one end and another type of connector on the other. Jumpers are used in the same manner as patch cords, to connect end devices or network hardware to the structured cabling system. Pigtail is a type of fiber cord, and in the the following text, the general information and types of pigtail will be provided.

Information About Fiber Optic Pigtail

Being different from fiber optic patch cord, fiber optical pigtail is a cable ended with fiber connectors at only one side of the cable while the other side without any connector (bare fiber). The connector side used for connection to the equipment while the bare fiber is melted with optical fiber. So the difference between a patch cord and a fiber optic pigtail lies in the two ends of the cable. Sometimes, we could change the patch cord into a fiber optical pigtail for some particular purposes. And it’s easy to operate, we could just cut the fiber optic patch cord in the middle, stripped its jacket and then into a pigtail. It seems that the basic structure of patch cord and pigtail are basically similar, but they do have great differences on their application area.

Fiber optical pigtails are usually used to realize the connection between patch panels in a Central Office or Head End and OSP cable. Often times they may also provide a connection to another splice point outside of center office. Besides, there are many types of fiber optic pigtail, such as LC pigtail, SC pigtail, ST pigtail, FC pigtail... We would mainly introduce some common types for you in the following part.

Types of Fiber Optic Pigtail

• LC Fiber Optic Pigtail
  LC fiber optic pigtail use LC connector and suit for density installations. It features low cost and high precision 1.25mm outer diameter ceramic ferrules. LC pigtail can be used in both single-mode and multimode cable. But it is highly favored of single mode applications. LC is used in multi media, CATV, and premise installation.
• SC Fiber Optic Pigtail
  SC fiber optic pigtails are a commonly used pigtail type in cable installation. SC connector is a non-optical disconnect connector with a 2.5mm pre-radiused zirconia. It is economic to use in many applications, such as LAN, WAN, CATV...The following picture shows a SC fiber optic pigtail.

• ST Fiber Optic Pigtail
  ST fiber optic connector is the most popular connector for multimode fiber optic LAN applications. It is a high performance fiber-optic connector with round ceramic ferrules and bayonet locking features. ST fiber optic pigtails are used in telecommunications, industry, medical and sensor fields.
• FC Fiber Optic Pigtail
  FC fiber optic pigtails use the metallic body. FC features the screw type structure and high precision ceramic ferrules. FC fiber optic pigtails and related products are known for the general and average applications. It can be used only with single-mode fiber-optic cabling. FC connector is commonly used for datacom, telecom, and measuring equipment.
• MU Fiber Optic Pigtail
  MU fiber optic pigtails use the MU connector that inherits the features and advantages of SC connector. It is also called “mini SC”, only half size of the SC and are more popular in Japan. Applications of MU connector include high-speed data communications, voice networks, telecommunications, and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM).

Summary

Fiber optic pigtail is a kind of cable that one end is connector while the other end is bare fiber. There are many types of pigtail based on different connectors on one end, such as LC, SC,ST, FC...For different requirements, such as fiber types, transmission distance, you can pick up an appropriate one to meet yours.