Here is a product that will light up your day! Anyone that has had to trace cables in patching bays will know the pain of trying to identify where the cables are patched if they are not labelled wich is nearly always the case!
Enter Amphenol’s Traceable Fiber Optic Patch Cords an easy way to see where the patch lead is! Similar systems have been around in copper networking for ages however, this is fairly new to Fiber optics!
According to Amphenol “The traceable fiber patch cord is an effective solution for eliminating interconnect errors in dense interconnect environments. When the power source is connected to the traceable indicator on one end of the patch cord, the traceable indicator on the other end of the patch cord lights up, allowing identification of patches even in dense installations.
Some of the more significant areas to use the traceable patch cord include data centres, central offices, mobile switching centres, telecommunication closets, active and passive fiber distribution hubs, and multi-dwelling units”.
The red LEDs are installed at both ends of the cable jumpers, and are especially crucial when there are a lot of cross connects. These TIA/EIA and IEC standard-based assemblies are capable of 400Gb/s and support both single-mode bend-insensitive fiber (≤ 0.15dB) and multi-mode OM3 and OM4 fiber (≤ 0.50dB) with an operating range of <0.3dB change from -40°C to +85°C.
Expected durability is 500 mating cycles (<0.2dB change) with ultra physical contact (UPC) connector return loss of ≤-55dB. Molex offers a similar solution in which the fiber link will flash green to help installers find and identify the fiber optic cable.
These systems are not cheap, but they will save time if you are going to be doing a lot of patching, which by the sounds of the latest generation 5G networks you will be doing!
Look out for my next blog on 5G Networks and how cables are oing to be a vital element in the enhancement of speed and data transfer!
