Cabling Chronicles
Free Cable Test Management Software – Reaping the Benefits of LinkWare™
Testing advanced cabling plants today is so complex that a single Category 5e test report can include more than 400 data fields. With typical jobs including hundreds and even thousands of links, even if network engineers examine all the results and determine that they all pass, there are still critical questions remaining: How can you tell if an incorrect test specification or the wrong adapter was used? Were all testers using the right software? Did you get the margins you expected and were they consistent?
March 28, 2013
How to Increase Multimode Testing Accuracy with Encircled Flux
Anyone who’s ever tested a multimode fiber optic link with light sources from different equipment vendors will know that the loss measurement can vary by as much as 50 percent. Without proper controls, multimode light sources will inject light differently into multimode fibers. Even light sources from the same manufacturer operating under different launch conditions, will produce diverse link-loss measurements, leading to different—and often confusing—test results.
March 11, 2013
Co-location Data Center Operators Testing Next Generation Cabling.
February 28, 2013
OTDR Troubleshooting in the Data Center? ...Yes we can!
The growing demand for higher bandwidth is affecting nearly every industry today, as organizations rely more on applications that support a variety of critical business processes. Whether it’s high-definition video, social media support, electronic medical records or other high-bandwidth applications, companies increasingly are facing a need to support higher capacity data transmission for their employees, customers and business partners. This trend toward greater capacity has in turn created an increased need for high bandwidth fiber optic cabling in the data center.
February 21, 2013
Encircled Flux – What is it, and Why Should You Care?
With the introduction of low loss fiber optic components such as LC/MPO cassettes, loss budgets (test limits) are becoming increasingly smaller. As a result, installers are finding out that previous methods and assumptions about fiber testing no longer hold true.
While the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) still allows 0.75 dB per connector, factory polished connectors are closer to 0.2 dB. So when testing to TIA limits, installers are afforded quite a bit of measurement uncertainty. In other words, their testing practices need to be reasonable but not perfect.
February 8, 2013
Finding the keys to success in the MPO datacenter
As companies try to address the rising demand in IP traffic in order to support a growing array of business applications, many are designing their data centers with fiber optic networks that support 10G or 40G Ethernet connections between servers, switches and storage area networks, and 100G Ethernet for core switching and routing backbone connections.
January 10, 2013
July 19, 2012
LinkWare 7 –A good thing just got a lot better!
What do Albert Einstein and Michael Jordan have in common? No, they’re not both LinkWare users… They focused on continuously learning and pushing the envelope even though they were already far ahead of everybody else. Just like our engineers who worked tirelessly to rebuild LinkWare from the ground up and make the best even better. Improvements include:
June 27, 2012
This one is for the ages! New OTDR redefines enterprise fiber testing.
By now you will have heard about the new OptiFiber Pro OTDR and that’s a relief for me because I’ve been biting my tongue for a while! Now that its been announced, let me share my impressions and an overview of what makes the product unique. I will also include some links to more detailed information. Take this from a guy that has spent five of the last seven years playing with OTDRs… I’ve used them all. And this one is going to change everything!
March 14, 2012
