High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! ESCON (Enterprise Systems Connection) is a data connection created by IBM, and is commonly used to connect their mainframe computers to peripheral devices such as disk storage and tape drives. ESCON is an optical fiber, half-duplex, serial interface. It originally operated at a rate of 10 Mbyte/s, which was later increased to 17Mbyte/s. The current maximum distance is 43 kilometers.