Wide band fibre has taken the next step for inclusion within ISO/IEC 11801 with the voting on the naming convention for the new optical fibre class concluding.
International voting for the naming convention revealed substantive support (72%) for the identifier OM5 which is in line with the Australian committee position.
OM5 Fibre will be optimized for operation between 850 to 953 nm and envisaged to deliver 100 Gb/s to 100 metres over two cores
Currently it is planned there will be four WDM channels utilised and the OM5 optical fibre will be backwards compatible to OM4
It should be noted the increase in bandwidth of the optical fibre core is associated with the utilisation of the four WDM channel not an increase of the bandwidth at 850nm and at this stage OM5 will offer no additional bandwidth benefits for single wavelength applications.
AS/NZS3080 is based on ISO/IEC 11801 and the adoption of OM5 is still dependent on the approval of the amendment of ISO/IEC 11801 currently underway.