When the time comes to buy spools of optical fiber for testing and demonstrating communications systems, there are a few items to consider that will help ensure you end up with an ideal setup.  Since it has been proven that following a few best practices will help you get the most out of your fiber, thinking about these four important items in advance will allow you to further qualify your needs as well as speed up the purchasing process.

Wide Area Network Emulators, or WANem, are designed to simulate WAN connections for use in laboratory settings, and makes for a good delay simulator as well.

By calculating the interactions between different network entities, WAN emulation creates artificial delay, bandwidth constraints and other impediments and functions.

This functions as a way to gauge applications and protocols against actual conditions. WAN characteristics like packet loss, disconnections, jitter, and time delay can be mimicked over a transparent application gateway with a WANem. This unique test condition allows users to bring the internet into their development, laboratory or test environment.