First, I apologize for posting a question in this site despite not having a football-court-sized datacenter under my management (I'm a tech support monkey at a small non-profit), but the topic seemed appropriate regardless.
The question I have is: What sort of damage exactly would happen if one connected a SC/APC patch cord to a SC/UPC module? (Assuming it's a low-power Ethernet connection in the ~2 km range.)
I've found different websites with claims ranging between "you'll just get a bit of insertion loss" (well yes, that's to be expected) and "you'll permanently destroy both connectors and/or the module" (how?).
However, out of a dozen websites claiming the latter, only two had any sort of concrete explanation, mainly about UPC reflections destroying very-high-power equipment.
We don't have high-powered equipment here; we have short-distance Gbit Ethernet which expects UPC in the first place. (And as it happens, the only patch cords at hand are either APC or multi-mode... Don't ask.)
Is that the only kind of damage that can occur, or can the mismatched angles also physically damage the connector "faces" and make them unusable? Or, well, something else?
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