Cabling Chronicles
OTDR: Your Ultimate Troubleshooter
So you’ve finished your fiber cable installation and are now on to the task of certifying the cable plant using an optical loss test set (OLTS) – it’s the tool you need for Tier 1 certification and the
most accurate for measuring loss to ensure application support.
February 28, 2018
Is Your Fiber End Face Up to Scratch?
While it seems we can never hammer home enough the need to properly clean and inspect fiber end-faces since contamination remains the number one cause of fiber link failures, have you ever thought about what exactly you are cleaning and inspecting?
February 21, 2018
BICSI Wrap Up: Top 3 Questions Asked
It’s always interesting at trade shows to learn what’s on the minds of end users, designers and technicians alike when it comes to testing. And this year’s BICSI Winter Conference was no different.
February 14, 2018
Know Your SYSTIMAX Loss Target Before You Fail!
We’ve covered fiber insertion loss in plenty of past blogs, so by now we hope that you know it’s the amount of signal loss that occurs as the signal travels along a cable link. We also hope you know that insertion loss is directly related to the length of the cable—the longer the cable, the greater the loss—and that any connection point along the way (connectors, splices, splitters, etc.) also adds to the loss.
February 7, 2018
Gain 3 CECs at Our BICSI Pre-Conference Seminar on Testing High Speed Fiber Links
High speed applications are driving the deployment of multifiber MPO/MTP architectures in the data center, and it’s not just cloud and hyperscale data centers that are deploying these solutions.
As the de facto interface for 40 Gig and 100 Gig switch-to-switch backbone data center applications that use parallel optics, MPO/MTP links are rapidly becoming commonplace in today’s enterprise data centers.
January 31, 2018
2018 - Smack-Dab in the IoT Revolution
At this time of year, every industry tends to reflect on the past twelve months and make predictions about what 2018 will bring – it’s just what we do. So why should this year be any different?
January 3, 2018
A Few of Our Favorite Blogs
In the spirit of the season and that “Sound of Music” favorite by Julie Andrews (that some have dubbed a holiday classic), we thought we’d take a moment to wish everyone Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for a Prosperous New Year and share with you a recap of some of this years’ favorite Cabling Chronicles (yes, it is sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things.”)
December 27, 2017
CPR - A Not-So-Ridiculous Regulation
There’s no doubt that the European Union has a lot of rules and regulations—something frequently pointed out by those who campaigned for a Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. And many joke about some of the more ridiculous ones, like the law that prohibits people from eating pet horses, or the one that prohibits manufacturers of bottled water from labels suggesting that consumption could fight dehydration. (Since when didn’t water fight dehydration?)
December 20, 2017
Troubleshooting Fusion Splices
A fusion splice is when two fibers are fused together using an electric arc. Often used with pigtails for connecting 250-micron outside plant fiber to 900-micron inside plant fiber at the building entrance, fusion splicing is achieved with a fusion splicing machine after the fiber is properly cleaved with a precision cleaver. Fusion splicing can be done for a single fiber or for 12-fiber ribbon cable via mass fusion splicing that splices all 12 fibers at once.
December 13, 2017
