Cabling Chronicles
You’re Just a Few Clicks Away from Finding Your Right Tool
In our ongoing efforts to enhance your credentials as a network management superstar, we have a new selection gizmo that will make picking the right tool as easy as, well, everything else we help you do.
September 24, 2013
Prevent Errors, Limit Complexity and Reduce Cost Associated with Cable Certification
Perhaps the last thing a buyer of cable test equipment thinks about when looking for a product is how to prevent testing errors—and that’s a big mistake. While issues such as cost, standards and specifications including bandwidth and test speeds are important, decision makers should not ignore the issues of project errors and the subsequent delays they can cause.
September 24, 2013
The Importance of ETL Verification
If you’re in the cable testing business, you should know about ETL Verification.
July 10, 2013
June 17, 2013
Free Cable Test Management Software – Reaping the Benefits of LinkWare™
Testing advanced cabling plants today is so complex that a single Category 5e test report can include more than 400 data fields. With typical jobs including hundreds and even thousands of links, even if network engineers examine all the results and determine that they all pass, there are still critical questions remaining: How can you tell if an incorrect test specification or the wrong adapter was used? Were all testers using the right software? Did you get the margins you expected and were they consistent?
March 28, 2013
How to Increase Multimode Testing Accuracy with Encircled Flux
Anyone who’s ever tested a multimode fiber optic link with light sources from different equipment vendors will know that the loss measurement can vary by as much as 50 percent. Without proper controls, multimode light sources will inject light differently into multimode fibers. Even light sources from the same manufacturer operating under different launch conditions, will produce diverse link-loss measurements, leading to different—and often confusing—test results.
March 11, 2013
Co-location Data Center Operators Testing Next Generation Cabling.
February 28, 2013
OTDR Troubleshooting in the Data Center? ...Yes we can!
The growing demand for higher bandwidth is affecting nearly every industry today, as organizations rely more on applications that support a variety of critical business processes. Whether it’s high-definition video, social media support, electronic medical records or other high-bandwidth applications, companies increasingly are facing a need to support higher capacity data transmission for their employees, customers and business partners. This trend toward greater capacity has in turn created an increased need for high bandwidth fiber optic cabling in the data center.
February 21, 2013
Encircled Flux – What is it, and Why Should You Care?
With the introduction of low loss fiber optic components such as LC/MPO cassettes, loss budgets (test limits) are becoming increasingly smaller. As a result, installers are finding out that previous methods and assumptions about fiber testing no longer hold true.
While the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) still allows 0.75 dB per connector, factory polished connectors are closer to 0.2 dB. So when testing to TIA limits, installers are afforded quite a bit of measurement uncertainty. In other words, their testing practices need to be reasonable but not perfect.
February 8, 2013
