Why wouldn’t I skip category 6 and go straight to optical fiber?
You can certainly do that but will find that a fiber system is still very expensive. Ultimately, economics drive customer decisions, and today optical fiber together with optical transceivers is about twice as expensive as an equivalent system built using category 6 and associated copper electronics. Installation of copper cabling is more craft-friendly and can be accomplished with simple tools and techniques. Additionally, copper cabling supports the emerging Data Terminal Equipment (DTE) power standard under development by IEEE (802.3af).
