Category Archives: Fiber Cable Assemblies

Fiber Cable Assemblies.The manufacturers that we represent serve the computer, datacommunications and structured-wiring marketplace.

FS Polarity Switchable LC Uniboot Cable: Leading Trend in Fibre Optics

The data centre is moving towards high speed and high density. How to build more optical fibre cables in limited space is becoming increasingly severe. In this case, FS.COM introduced a new-type product suitable for high density cabling requirement—polarity switchable LC uniboot cable. It’s the preferred option for high density data centre connection today. Its largest feature is switchable polarity, designed to eliminate the need for dual zip cords and reduce overall bulk cabling by 50%. But do you know about polarity switchable LC uniboot cable? What are the features of it and how to reverse the polarity? You may find answer in this post.

Introduction to LC Uniboot Fibre Patch Cable

LC uniboot fibre patch cables are designed for high density applications in data centre environment. Generally, the LC uniboot patch cord is designed with a polarization method that can help users easily reverse the fibre polarity. In addition, the LC uniboot fibre patch cable can reduce cable management space comparing to standard patch cord as it places both simplex fibres into one jacket while still terminating into a duplex LC connector. Similar to the standard patch cord, single-mode and multimode versions are available in LC uniboot patch cables.

Polarity Switchable LC Uniboot Cable

Features & Advantages

FS polarity switchable LC uniboot cables feature high density. They are used to connect switches or network devices in fibre networks directly or interconnect structured cabling systems in a fibre network. Besides, FS uniboot fibre patch cable has the following highlights.

  • Easy polarity reversal: Polarity changes can be made in the field quickly, without the use of tools, to the correct fibre mapping polarity.
  • “All in One” international quality cable assemblies: FS uniboot fibre patch cable has passed IEC61300-3-35 end-face standard, EIA/TIA-455-171A attenuation standard and CE, etc. providing customers with the outstanding, standards-compliant products and services.
  • LC licence compliant & 0.2dB IL: The worldwide licence and low insertion loss keep your network running fast and smooth.
  • 2.0mm round cable design: 2.0mm thin diametre allows the polarity to be switched from A-B to A-A without any tools.
  • More fibre options: OM3, OM4, and OS2.
  • Space saving: It can save the space of cassettes and cable management by 68%.
How to Achieve Polarity Reversal of LC Uniboot Cable

As we know, for traditional cabling systems using single fibre connectors, maintaining polarity requires that the “A” transmits signal and at the same time the “B” receives signal. But duplex patch cords used to complete serial duplex pair connections available in two types, depending on which polarity technique is used— “A-to-B” patch cord for “straight-through” wiring and “A-to-A” patch cord for “crossover”wiring. Thus, polarity reversal is usually required during fibre optic cabling.

However, polarity reversal of traditional LC patch cable is very inconvenient and annoying since some minor mistakes could lead to various troubles. Therefore, FS.COM developed the LC uniboot cable that is easier for polarity reversal, without having to re-terminate the connectors. Here two methods of polarity reversal are introduced as follows.

LC-uniboot-polarity-reversal

From the above picture, we can see that we can use just 3 steps to reverse polarity. Type one (the left one):

1. Open connector top.

2. Switch the polarity from A-B to A-A.

3. Close connector top.

Type two (the right one):

1. Open connector top.

2. Rotate connector 180 degree to exchange the position.

3. Close connector top.

Summary

To address the increasing demand for high density applications and smaller fibre cable, the LC uniboot fibre patch cable is designed to help cut down cabling space and provide more effective polarity reversal solution. I hope this article could help you choose the proper product for high density cabling. FS.COM not only provides polarity switchable LC fibre patch cable, but also provides bend insensitive fibre patch cable which is also a high density cabling application. Welcome to consult with customer service for more details.

Tips for Fibre Cable Installation You Should Know

Fibre cable installation is not an easy task for most of us. It’s thought as the job of professional engineers since special training is needed during the complicated process. But it would be better if you know knowledge of fibre cable installation in case that you need to run fibre cable in your home or business. This article is going to offer you some tips for fibre cable installation.

fiber-cable-installation

Before Fibre Cable Installation

Before starting fibre cable installation, please make sure there is fibre optic service in your area. If it’s available, find the nearest distribution box. What you need to do is to run fibre cable from the box to your house.

A considerate plan is the first step of successful fibre cable installation. Carefully design the cabling route. It would be better if you mark where the cable goes, into the walls, or underground, or through conduit… Point out all the termination points and splice points. At the same time, write down any potential problems you may come across during the installation. A good plan is also beneficial to avoid fibre cable waste.

Once finish the plan, you’re going to buy fibre optic cable for your applications. Except fibreoptic cable, you need tools for cable management & installation, fibre splicing and fibre testing. So make a shopping list for your fibre cable installation. Then select a reliable fibre cable supplier who can meet the requirements of both high quality and low cost.

During Fibre Cable Installation
What You Should Do

Leave spare cable length—Each fibre cable for installation should be a few inches longer than the plan says. Because you can’t make sure everything goes as you wish. So you should leave plenty of spare fibre cables when beginning cable installation work.

Avoid electrical interference—Though fibre cable is not as vulnerable to electrical noise as copper cables, some devices, such as the boxes for fluorescent lights, may cause interference. So keep your fibre cable three or more feet from those devices.

Avoid end face contamination—The tip of fibre optic connector can be easily contaminated or damaged. So leave protective caps on until you are ready to plug into the equipment. Don’t forget to inspecting the end face before plugging in. If there is any contaminate, clean it.

Fibre network testing—Test each section of your fibre optic network. That’s easy to discover the problem and troubleshoot it. Don’t do this work until you finish the entire cable installation. In that situation, it’s hard to find out the trouble if the network fails.

What You Should Not Do

Don’t bend fibre cables. Fibre optic cables perform the best when it is running straight. But during installation in reality, sometimes bending can’t be avoided. Cables from different vendors may have different standards of bend radius. Or you can buy bend insensitive fibre cable for better performance.

Don’t pull too hard on the cable. Properly pull the fibre cable to avoid bending or snagging through the conduit or underground. However, don’t pull it too hard especially when the fibre cable is too short. Otherwise, it would ruin the cable or fibre optic connector.

Don’t mix and match different core sizes. Fibre optic cables are typically colour coded. From the outside cable jacket, you can get information about fibre core sizes. To know more about fibre cable jacket, you can visit my last blog What Can We Get From Fibre Cable Jacket?

Don’t pinch the fibre cable. Pinch the fibre cable can squeeze the fibre and affect link performance. When use zip-ties, pay attention to this point.

Conclusion

Once you finish fibre cable installation, you can enjoy fibre optic network. See, fibre cable installation is not as tough as you think. Follow these tips mentioned above when you run cables for your house, you can keep away from most bothering issues.

What Can We Get From Fibre Cable Jacket?

Fibre optic cable is applied as the most advanced communication medium by more and more users. Compared with copper cable, it can support more and better optical signal transmission of voice, data, video, etc. and offer many other advantages. When purchasing fibre optic cables, you must see the cable jacket at first. So what information does the outside jacket tell? What type of cable jacket should you select? Come with me to find the secrets of fibre cable jacket.

Fibre Cable Jacket Introduction

Fibre optic cable is constructed very complicated from the inside core, cladding, coating, strengthen fibres to the outside cable jacket. The core made of plastic or glass is the physical medium for optical signal transmission. As bare fibre can be easily broken, cable outer jacket is needed for fibre protection. The cable jacket is the first line of moisture, mechanical, flame and chemical defense for a cable. Without the jacket, fibre optic cables are very likely to be damaged during and after installation.

fiber-cable-jacket

Fibre Cable Jacket Characteristics

In most situations, robust cable jacket is better because the environment above or underground may be harsh. For better applications, you’d better take cable jacket seriously. Cable jacket is not as easy as you think. There are many characteristics you need to consider. Except the flexibility, it should withstand very low and high temperature. Whether the cable jacket has the good features of chemical and flame resistance. All these characteristics depend on cable jacket materials.

Fibre Cable Jacket Materials

Cable jacket is made of various types of materials. As mentioned above, the cable jacket should stand the test of different environmental conditions, including the harsh temperature, the sun & the rain, chemicals, abrasion, and so on. The following shows several common cable jacket materials for your reference.

PE (Polyethylene)—PE is the standard jacket material for outdoor fibre optic cables. It has excellent properties of moisture and weather resistance. It also has the good electrical properties over a wide temperature range. Besides, it’s abrasion resistant.

PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride )—PVC is flexible and fire-retardant. It can be used as the jacket materials for both indoor and outdoor cables. PVC is more expensive than PE.

LSZH (Low Smoke Zero Halogen)—LSZH jacket is free of halogenated materials which can be transformed into toxic and corrosive matte during combustion. LSZH materials are used to make a special cable called LSZH cable. LSZH cables produce little smoke and no toxic halogen compounds when these cables catch fire. Based on the benefits, LSZH cable is a good choice for inner installations.

Fibre Cable Jacket Colour

Fibre cable jacket colour depends on the fibre cable type. Fibre cable includes single-mode and multimode types. For single-mode fibre cable (Blog about single-mode fibre cable please read my blog What Are OM1, OM2, OM3 and OM4?), the jacket colour is typically yellow. While for multimode cable ( more details on multimode fibre cable ), the jacket colour can be orange (OM1&OM2 cable), aqua (OM3 cable) and purple (OM4 cable). For outside plant cables, the jacket colour is black.

How to Choose Fibre Cables?

To choose a fibre optic cable depends on your own applications. I’ll talk about this from two sides of jacket colour and jacket material. The cable jacket colour is not just for good looking. Different colour means different fibre mode. Which one suits you the most, the yellow or orange fibre cable? You should know well about the colour codes before buying your fibre cables. What’s more, you should also consider the installation requirements and environmental or long-term requirements. Where will be your fibre cables installed, inside or outside the building? Will your cables be exposed to hash environment very long? This can help you decide which jacket material is the best.

Summary

As a popular data transmission medium, fibre cable plays an important role in communication field. To some degree, the success of fibre connectivity lies in a right fibre cable. How to buy suitable fibre optic cables? This article describes the method from cable jacket. When selecting fibre cable, many other factors still need to be considered. Hope you can get your own fibre cable.

Fiber Optic Components for Building 10G Data Centers

10 Gigabit Ethernet is a telecommunication technology that can support the network speed up to 10 billion bits per second. It’s also known as 10GbE. As 10GbE greatly increases bandwidth, many companies start to upgrade the data centers to meet their growing needs. How to build a 10G data center? What kind of equipment will be used except the switch? This article will recommend you some basic 10G solutions.

10G SFP+ (small form-factor pluggable plus) modules are hot swappable transceivers that plug into SFP+ slots on switches and support 10G data center. With small form factor, SFP+ transceivers can ensure low power disruption and high port density. Since it’s hot pluggable, the transceiver modules can be added or removed without interrupting the whole network. And SFP+ modules deliver data transmission speed of up to 10Gbit/s, which is 10 times faster than Gigabit Ethernet.

10g-sfp-module

Currently, a wide variety of SFP+ modules can be purchased in the market. For the long distance transmission, modules include SFP-10GBASE-LR, SFP-10GBASE-ER, SFP-10GBASE-ZR, CWDM SFP+ and DWDM SFP+. For the short distance transmission, there are modules like SFP 10GBASE-SR, SFP-10GBASE-LRM. Brands are also versatile such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Brocade, etc. To get modules with lower costs, you can pick third-party transceivers which are compatible with these original brands.

Patch cables contain both fiber and copper types. Fiber patch cords, as one of the data transmission media, enjoy great popularity because they have large transmission capacity, strong anti-electromagnetic interference, high security and fast speed. LC fiber patch cord is one of the most common cables for 10G data center, covering single-mode and multimode categories respectively for data transmission over long distance and short distance. To increase panel density, flexible HD LC push-pull tab fiber patch cable is designed. With its unique design, this patch cable allows the connector to be disengaged easily from densely loaded panels without the need for special tools and give users easy accessibility in narrow areas for data center deployment applications. Another special LC patch cord is uniboot patch cord. It utilizes a special “round duplex” cable that allows duplex transmission within a single cable. It’s good for saving cable management space comparing to standard patch cords.

lc-patch-cable

10G SFP+ Direct Attach Cable Assemblies

10G SFP+ direct attach cable (DAC ) is a cost-effective solution for 10G data center. It’s a low-power alternative to optical SFP+ system. The 10G SFP+ cables provide low-cost and reliable 10G speed with either copper cables over distances up to 10 m or active optical cables reaching distances up to 100 m. Because there is no need for spending on fiber optic transceivers and cables. This kind of cables contain 10G SFP+ copper cables, both passive and active and active optical cable (AOC). Active copper cable and AOC are designed for long distance connection, while passive copper cable is for short distance, such as the interconnection of top-of-rack switches with application servers and storage devices in a rack.

10g-sfp-cables

Fiber Enclosure

Fiber enclosure is an equipment you must have in data centers. This component is used to provide a flexible and modular system for managing fiber terminations, connections, and patching in high density data center application to maximize rack space utilization and minimize floor space. Fiber enclosure can be divided into different configurations like rack mount (available in 1U, 2U, 3U, 4U), wall mount, indoor or outdoor. The rack mount enclosure come into three flavors. One is the slide-out type and the other two are removable type and swing out type. Fiberstore introduces high density fiber enclosures with 48 ports, 96 ports and even 288 ports loaded LC FAPs (fiber adapter panels) in 1RU or 4RU rack mount for 10G solutions. Or if you already have the unloaded fiber enclosures, you just need to buy fiber adapter panels.

288-pors-4u-patch-panel-enclosure

Conclusion

To build a 10G data center, you have to prepare the components, for instance, 10G SFP+ modules, LC patch cables, 10G SFP+ cables, fiber enclosures, etc. You may also need other instruments for testing and cable organization. And all those equipment can be got from FS.COM with higher quality but fewer costs. For more information, you can contact us via sales@fs.com.

Fibre Optic Polishing Kits Solution

Fibre Optic Polishing kits play an important role in fibre optic installation. They are specially used in fibre industry for polishing the end face of fibre optic product.

Unlike electrical wires, optical fibres require end-surface treatment for proper light propagation. The two most common ways of surface preparations are cleaving and polishing. While fibre cleavage is very effective on fibres with small diameters such as 125 microns, polishing is essential for almost all glass-based fibres with cladding diameters larger than 200 microns. Furthermore, all fibre connectors require polishing. We will focus our discussion on glass-based fibre polishing in this tutorial since plastic optical fibres (POF) can be cut with special blades at elevated temperatures with satisfactory results.

In Fiberstore fibre optic polishing catalogs, you will find our fibre optic polishing machines and other fibre polishing machine kits including fibre polishing fixture for all types of fibre connectors, fibre optic polishing puck and fibre optic polishing paper.

Fibre Optic Polishing Machine

Fiberstore Fibre optic polishing machine is specially designed for ferrule polishing. The optional accessories – the various connector polishing jigs – allow the fixing and polishing of the most commonly used connector types. This polishing machine owns the advanced features as slow start, adjustable speed and weight, along with changeable polishing jigs. There are square pressurized polisher and central pressurized polisher.

All of Fiberstore’s precision connector polishing machines offerings are designed for superior performance by utilizing a rigid fixture system, which is significantly better than floating fixture type machines. Our optical fibre polishing machines are accurate and repeatability to consistently achieve superior production results when measuring apex offset, radius of curvature, fibre protrusion, back reflection and under-cut.

Two factors are of utmost importance when selecting a polishing machine: Yield and throughput. Yield is an indicator of quality and repeatability. Throughput is a measure of productivity. The Domaille polishers are leaders in the industry in terms of both yield and throughput. By allowing you to adjust platen force, speed, time and slow start capability, it will satisfy virtually any exacting specification.

Fibre optic polishing fixture(Jigs)

Fiberstore available for the following connector:

SC-UPC, SC-APC
FC-UPC, FC-APC
ST-UPC
LC-UPC, LC-APC
MU-UPC
MT-RJ
E2000-UPC, E2000-APC

Custom Fixtures Available

Fiberstore optical fibre polishing fixtures, coupled with our optical fibre polishing machines, hold the close tolerances and repeatability required to achieve superior production results for apex offset, radius of curvature, fibre protrusion, back reflection and under-cut.

Fiberstore fixtures in round, square models. Models are available in 10, 12, 18, 24 and 36 port configurations depending on connector style. All models are manufactured from hardened stainless steel with ferrule holes and centre bores controlled to the tightest tolerances in the industry guaranteed. Our Polishing Fixtures are used for polishing all industry standard fibre optic connectors. Available in one-piece connector or ferrule-only fixtures.

Fibre Optic Hand Polishing Puck

Fiberstore hand polishing puck is used to polish SC,ST and FC type fibre optic connectors. Our hand polish puck is made by CNC machines for repeated quality and accuracy. The unique design prevents vapor locking and surface tension so your connectors are polished properly.

Material: Stainless Steel
Suitable Connectors: LC, MU, SC, ST, FC SC APC

Fibre Optic Polishing Paper

Fibre optic polishing paper is using latest developments of international Ultra-precision coating technology, uniformly dispersed the abrasive powder micron and nanometer (diamond, white fused alumina, silicon carbide, silicon oxide, cerium oxide, iron oxide, etc.) and new polymer material on the high-strength film surface. The main purpose of fibre optic polishing paper: Optical fibre connectors, couplers, attenuators polishing; Ceramic ferrule, plastic inserts, glass tube hairs polishing; Optical devices, optical crystal polishing.

Features:
Evenly-sprayed particles on coated surfaces.
Submicron powder particles make high polishing accuracy.
Positioned lapping & polishing to save abrasive materials.
Fine curved surface polishing effects because of flexible substrate.
Suitable for polishing with dry, water or oil.

UND0.5 UND1 UND2 UND3 UND6 UND9 UND15 UND30 UND45
Size( μ m) 0.5 1 2 3 6 9 15 30 45
Mesh 10000 8000 6000 4000 3000 2000 1200 600 400
Round Specification(mm) Φ 70 / Φ 110 / Φ 127 / Φ 203
Square Specification(mm) 114 × 114 / 152 × 152 / 228 × 228
Banding(mm) 1.6 / 2.0 / 2.5 / 3.2 / 3.8 / 101.6