Fiber

Alwayslearningelec

Senior Member
Location
NJ
Occupation
Estimator
Anyone familiar with fiber terminations? When you need to land on a fiber patch panel what are different scenarios you could have regarding having to splice and using a splice try or other equipment? I though you would just put an ST or LC connector on the end of the fiber and terminate it in the panel.

If you fusion splice you need to have them within a tray then they go into the patch panel?
 
What is the problem you're trying to solve? I ask because in our DCs, the telecoms have, without any exceptions that I'm aware of, brought their fiber in and fusion spliced to fairly large patch panels using what's essentially a series of pigtails on trays. From there, we run factory terminated cross connects out to the customers' cabinets. Just sticking a connector on the end as you would with CAT6 only sometimes works and is a pain to troubleshoot. Occasionally you get lucky and it works perfectly, once in a while you'll fail utterly and get nothing, but usually what happens is a marginal connection that carries data, but wastes a lot of time in error correction and recovery.
 
There are a lot of different options. Different types of cables, different connectors, and such. Some need breakout kits for the cable, other don't. Some need a splice tray, others don't. There are fusion connectors, mechanical connectors, polish and no polish, and more.

In general, the idea is often to terminate the service entrance cable in a box somewhere, and then run patch cables from there so the service entrance cable never needs to be touched again. You want to avoid having to replace that cable ever, if at all possible.

I've tried to decipher it all many times, and it's still somewhat of a mystery to me.
 
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