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Above: Multiport terminal and splice closure

Above: Multiport terminal stubbed

FTTH for bandwidth demands To meet the unprecedented demand for high-performance services and to ease the competitive pressure in today’s market, a Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH) deployment is the solution for operators who want virtually unlimited bandwidth, flexibility, scalability, ease of deployment and reliability in their access network infrastructures. Every component in an FTTH deployment is critical, but none more so than the customer connection. The optical fibre connector is what links a customer to the life-enhancing benefits of fibre to the home, so access to the entire network is dependent on the reliability of a single connection point. Operators used to deploy FTTH with standard SC or LC pigtails spliced in conventional closures at Network Access Points (NAPs) and/or distribution points. These closures had to be opened each time a new customer was connected, but repeated re-entry into the closure introduced risk of damage to the active fibre connections, causing failures and rework. Re-opening closures also increased the potential for contaminated grommets and silicone sealing, preventing closures from protecting fibres from water and dust.

This risk of damage and contamination is heightened when connections are performed by the customer connection team lacking the same level of installation experience as the network build staff. When a network is installed poorly, an accumulation of faults naturally occurs over time. One operator reported that he had to rework 12 per cent of the network’s active FTTH connections each year, mostly due to issues caused by re-entry. Innovative FTTH solution What the industry needed was a more reliable FTTH connectivity – a new approach designed for the outside plant to reduce complexity, increase the speed of deployment and solve the reliability issues of closure re-entry. A closure’s function is to provide protection against the elements, including temperature extremes, moisture, humidity and other harsh conditions. Any mechanism intended to replace a closure in a FTTH deployment had to perform that function, meaning the solution had to be rated IP68 for water ingress and dust protection.

The solution is a hardened connector that itself is rated IP68,

Above: Hardened connector ready for connection

Above: Multiport terminals for distribution points

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Vol. 38 No. 4 - November 2016 Issue