scte PRESENTS
plays an important role in improving both the technologies deployed in the field and the methods used to verify their performance.
Against this backdrop, the SCTE continues to emphasise professional standards and engineering discipline. Ongoing work on standards development, peer review and shared best practice
analytics don’t help. And if we can’t clearly demonstrate performance, SLAs and the customer experience, we’ll suffer,” said Dr Basham.
Testing and Measurement PLATINUM SPONSOR PRESENTATION You’ve Been Framed
Frame Communications’ managing director Gavin McGowan made a simple point: if you’re not testing properly, you don’t really know what you’ve built – and you can’t prove what you’ve paid for. McGowan opened by taking the room to Jamaica, where his team had been asked to verify a fibre build for a UK operator. After around 10 days on site, with five engineers carrying out walkouts, visual inspections and testing, the numbers were ugly. “We had a failure rate of over 40%,” he told the audience, describing the moment he hit send on an email report late on a Sunday night that, in his words, “was going to set off a bomb in the boardroom” back in the UK. The lesson, he said, cuts both ways: without test data, operators can’t validate work done by contractors, and contractors can’t prove they’ve delivered to spec. It also set up a pitch for the Newmarket-based company: the hardware test-set market is mature, but the workflow around it is still messy. McGowan argued there’s “very, very little difference in hardware between a Japanese machine, a Chinese machine or a green machine,” but there’s still a “gap in terms of reporting and automation.” Frame’s answer is an IoT- and GNSS- based layer that connects directly to test equipment, aiming to centralise asset control, standardise configuration and Quality Assurance (QA), improve utilisation, and tackle the practical problems of loss and theft. The company is starting with support for two tool types: an “active V-groove machine for fibre to the home” and a “core alignment machine” for deeper network work.
reflects — all of which can complicate OTDR trace interpretation, including large apparent gains or losses at interfaces and more reflective events. For near-term FTTH operations, McGowan favours bidirectional testing to counter measurement mismatches, smarter in-home testers spanning Layer 1 to Layer 4, field-replaceable ferrules and cleaner ways to move results off tools — for example QR/NFC workflows designed for secure sites. He also visited network validation and proactive assurance, spanning pre- production stress testing and security scenarios, then moving into Ethernet service OAM (Y.1731). With Frame’s 2023 majority stake in Bristol-based AIOps firm NetMinded, he said they’re pushing beyond continuity-check “Ethernet ping” into synthetic traffic that can quantify loss, delay and jitter. The approach, he stressed, is deliberately lightweight in production: “It’s only a little bit of test traffic going on in the background.” Frame has deployed the system at National Broadband Ireland, claiming it scales “up to a million” endpoints.
McGowan also leaned on security, describing a “sovereign cloud… hosted in London,” alongside geolocation, proactive maintenance triggers and the ability to remotely disable stolen tools. McGowan pointed to multi-core fibre and hollow-core fibre as the next big innovations. Multi-core’s selling point is its density: pack lots of cores into one strand, potentially turning a 48-fibre cable into something closer to “nearly 1,000 cores” without changing the footprint. Hollow- core’s promise is latency, thanks to light travelling faster through an air-filled core. As McGowan put it: “Light travels about a third faster in hollow-core fibre than in traditional fibre,” which he linked to data centre and 5G use cases. But both come with new splicing and measurement headaches: tight rotational- alignment requirements for multi-core; thermal management to avoid deforming outer cores or collapsing a hollow core; and sensitivity to dust (multi-core) and humidity (hollow-core). On the test side, he pointed to shifts in dispersion, bend sensitivity (he suggested hollow- core needs far more conservative bend control), and big changes in how light
Volume 48 No.1 MARCH 2026
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