ELLEN MANNING FIBRE MANAGEMENT
KEEPING IT TIDY MANAGING A MULTITUDE OF FIBRES
The massive demand for new fibre connections has created a large number of bottlenecks right across the physical network layer. Enabling access to individual connectors and reliability are among the issues driving manufacturers to develop innovative solutions for physical connectivity. Ellen Manning looks at some of the latest developments.
W hen optical networks were first built, things were fairly simple. Connect fibres from A to B, make sure engineers can access them to reconfigure a network when necessary and it’s done. Simple - until the demands on those networks grew exponentially, bringing the need for more and more fibres. Set that growth against a finite resource - space, whether in data centres, cell sites or street cabinets - and things aren’t quite so simple. With space at a premium, says Andreas Silas, market portfolio manager of fibre management systems at Huber & Suhner, nobody wants to waste it on fibre management systems when they could be using it for active equipment. Michael Zammit, VP and GM, Connectivity Solutions at Go!Foton, agrees. “You would rather have expensive servers and routers that are putting services onto the network where you can be generating
customers and new antennas. If they can’t reasonably go in and access these individual fibres that are now in an even more compact environment, you’re going to create problems.” STAYING AHEAD OF THE GAME With so much at stake, while fibre managements systems may not be the rock stars of the optical fibre world, without them there’s no concert at all and with no sign of demand letting up, vendors are keen to stay one step ahead. At Huber & Suhner, various solutions are addressing the challenges. They include structured cabling solutions including its new LISA Double Access fibre management system, as well as recently-launched IANOS high-density
revenue, but instead you’re having to allocate your real estate resources to simply managing the pipe.” The issue doesn’t just apply to data centres, says Zammit. “In some cases, like in the mobile network now where everybody’s going bananas about 5G, they’re going out to existing cell-site locations and saying, ‘jeez we need to put in twice as much fibre and we’ve got no space’. How do you go into these little compact spaces that are already fully congested and double your fibre capacity?” There’s also the issue of what happens when something goes wrong. With thousands of fibres squeezed into tiny spaces, what was once a relatively simple job is nearly impossible. “When you’re talking about densification, you have a situation that can create a tremendous amount of chaos”, says Zammit. “It is necessary in the operations of these complex networks for technicians to go in there and do their thing, whether it’s adding new subscribers, doing diagnostic testing or connecting new
inter-connects. “It’s very high density so we have many fibres
DUNCAN ELLIS DIRECTOR EMEA, WAVE2WAVE
www.opticalconnectionsnews.com
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ISSUE 16 | Q1 2019
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