When speaking with a representative from one of our distributors the other night, he said something that resounded with me. We were discussing how some customers refuse to spend money on their physical plant. They are willing to buy used fiber panels or jumpers from cut-rate assembly shops with questionable quality. Some customers even buy cables from eBay with unknown quality standards in the effort to save a couple of dollars.
The gentleman I spoke with used to work in the automotive industry and he made a great analogy. The way he put it (and I am paraphrasing):
A fiber network is like a road. You can either spend the money on good pavement and materials or you can build a dirt road with poor conditions. At slow speeds, either of these will work. The problem is that if you want to drive a sports car at high speeds on that road — that is going to be a problem. Rough conditions and potholes are going to restrict the speed at which you can travel.
Fiber networks are similar. Just because you are able to run existing GPON or active-E networks on a system using cheap, poor quality jumpers and panels, that does not mean that next generation networks like NGPON2 and 4G/5G networks will function on that same system. Like the sports car traveling at high speeds, these faster networks will struggle if the physical plant has excessive loss and reflectivity from poor connectors and splices.
In an effort to better support our customers, Clearfield endorses the FiberDeep product line that ensures low loss, high quality connectors.
FiberDeep Cable Assemblies guarantees .2dB or less insertion loss on every singlemode patch cord and 12-fiber assembly deployed within the Clearview Cassette. No longer considered a commodity in today’s cable plant, next generation networks require superior performance standards – and Clearfield delivers fiber connectivity products to ensure consistent reliability.
No matter what kind of traffic your network carries, the success of your business comes down to the quality of your cable plant.
Available on every singlemode patch cord and 12 fiber assembly deployed within the Clearview Cassette, FiberDeep improves your fiber network’s performance while reducing the cost of deployment. Clearfield offers cable assemblies in custom and standard lengths, ranging from simple multimode and singlemode patch cords, to some of the most complex assemblies in inside and outside plant environments.
By: Tom Warren, Applications Engineer