Multimode &
Singlemode fiber are the five types of fiber in common use. Both fibers are 125 microns in outside diameter - a micron is one one-millionth of a meter & 125 microns is 0.005 inches- a bit larger than the typical human hair.
Multimode fiber has light travelling in the core in lots of rays, called modes. It's a bigger core (always 62.5 microns, but sometimes 50 microns) & is used with LED sources at wavelengths of 850 & 1300 nm for slower local area networks (LANs) & lasers at 850 & 1310 nm for networks jogging at gigabits per second or more.
singlemode has a much smaller core, only about 9 microns, so that the light travels in one ray. It is used for telephony & CATV with laser sources at 1300 & 1550 nm. Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) is large core (about 1mm)
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