By Jon Anderson
The FTTH Expo recently concluded with much fanfare and optimism. Now we all get to go back to weekly tasks and as service providers often find out, the ‘blue sky’ of the conferences can fade into the clouds of reality.
However, there is a bright spot that may ‘make your day’ if you’re facing a fiber exhaust scenario with aging legacy optical transport equipment such as Async/SONET platforms with discrete WBO (Wideband Optics – either 1310 nm or 1550 nm). Those seem to always be on fiber routes that are very constrained…maybe it’s an old 6 or 12 Fiber toll cable that has served you well but now this route needs added capacity and there is no time / budget for a cable overbuild. Well at Clearfield we might suggest you check into the Clearfield Circulator MOC option and let us assist you in qualifying your application scenario. Once we visit with you for a few minutes, we may be able to suggest some interesting fiber relief alternatives for your consideration.
For example, the Clearfield MOC Cassette Fiber Panels/Fiber Frames can be equipped with wide band optical circulators (either 1310 nm or 1550 nm or both) depending on your application requirements. Essentially these tiny modular optical components can create virtual glass for you on a temporary or permanent basis simply by applying the physics we learned about in RF circulators to the photonic domain…in this case, essentially polarizing two WB optical signals on differing planes so they can take your normal 4 fiber uni-directional fiber strands (XMT & RCV Working, XMT & RCV Protect) and convert them into two bi-directional strands thereby relieving two of your 4 fiber strands. They may be tiny but they have powerful compelling economics behind them. The Circulators, with their ~ 1.6 dB of paired insertion loss, bode well for your existing link loss budget. Coupling (pun intended) this with integration into the Clearfield Cassettes makes an elegant, graceful, flexible and cost effective solution for your fiber relief or fiber exhaust scenarios especially on older legacy WBO transport/access platforms.
Contact us for more information any time and at your convenience. Clearfield – Application Engineering (1-800-422-2537)
Note: For fiber relief on routes equipped with newer optical transport platforms – SFP/XFP based optics, ask us about our C/DWDM MOC solutions in the same Cassette based MOC form factor.