Cabling Chronicles

Cable Testing 101: How to Read the LinkWare™ PC Report

In our last 101 Series Blog, we took at closer look at everything in blue at the top of your LinkWare Report. But what if your customer wants you to explain the detail and those pretty charts to the right?

Let's dive deeper so you're prepared for that possibility.

November 10, 2016

Cable Testing 101: Understanding Your LinkWare Report

So you used your DSX-5000 to test some recently installed copper network runs for your customer. You can easily see on your tester if the link failed or passed for the application you were testing, but now your customer wants a customized report showing the detail. 

November 3, 2016

Understand the Wide Band Multimode Fiber (WBMMF)

October 20, 2016

Cable Testing 101: There's No Gain with "Gainers"

Akin to water flowing from a small pipe into a large pipe, gainers are essentially perceived increases in optical power that occur at splice points due to variations in fiber characteristics, including core diameter, numerical apertures, mode field diameters and backscatter coefficients.

October 13, 2016

Benefits of Using 8-Fiber Plug and Play MPO Solutions

The use of plug-and-play 12-fiber MPO solutions for multimode fiber backbones in the data center has been popular for several years, starting with 10 Gigabit Ethernet where 12-fiber MPO assemblies connect MPO-to-LC cassettes or modules that transition the 12-fiber MPO connections to 6 duplex LC connections.

October 6, 2016

Advantage of Automated Fiber Inspection over Manual

 

Over the past decade, the amount of fiber in the data center has increased significantly due to the need for higher bandwidth between switches and the ever increasing amount of equipment requiring fiber uplinks to storage area networks (SANs), not to mention the demand for maximum availability that calls for redundant primary and secondary fiber network connections to every piece of equipment.

September 28, 2016

Deploy and Test Shielded Cable with Category 8

 

The TIA TR-42.7 Copper Cabling Subcommittee recently approved specifications for Category 8 cabling (TIA 568 C.2-1), the latest twisted-pair copper system designed to support future IEEE 25GBASE T and 40GBASE T applications currently under development.

With all the buzz surrounding Category 8, you and your customers might be wondering how exactly it will impact the deployment and testing of cabling infrastructures.

Let's take a closer look at where it will be deployed and some of the key characteristics that impact installation and testing.

September 22, 2016

Upgrading Your Fiber Plant to 40 and 100 Gigabit Speeds

Just Now Upgrading to 10 Gig? We Didn't Forget About You

While upgrading backbone cable plants in the LAN to support 10 Gig has been going on for several years since the release of the 10GBASE-SR standard for fiber, many enterprise businesses did not previously require these types of speeds, until now.

September 8, 2016