[rescue] fiber goodness

[Tim H.]

On Tue, 8 Oct 2002 12:20:16 -0400
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

>    Those connectors usually can't be disassembled.
> 
>    Proper cables, though, with any connectors commonly used for FDDI 
> (MIC, SC, and ST) are always on eBay for cheap, though.  Don't fuck 
> with it...just get the right cables.  Fiber is a pain in the ass to 
> deal with yourself unless you have a good termination kit, which 
> usually cost thousands of dollars.
> 
>       -Dave

I agree, and it is a real pain too, because fiber termination is now a
piece of cake compared to a decade ago, and the market has grown so much
that the price is totally unjustified.  All it take these days is a good
precision stripper, a good calibrated crimper, and a pair of ceramic
scissors.  I remember when it was such a pain that people bought
terminated pigtails and a $30K fusion splicer to do field terminations.

Everything was hand terminated, epoxied into the ferrules and the ends
hand polished, there was no such thing as dry or crimp terminations. 
Fusion splicers are actually pretty cool, and at that time there was
enough art left in splicing that those of us that could splice multimode
to singlemode and get low loss numbers were respected.  Of course you
can't get very low loss numbers shooting light from multi to single, but
the other way worked OK.  The fusion splicers never got it automatically
right, because they were looking through the fiber sideways, and lining
up edges, and they always got confused when one fiber had a core twice
as wide as the other. 

In fact, when I was in that business(a little over a decade ago), our
group made termination pigtails for money, because the bleeding edge
couplers we were making were being sold at a big loss because our reject
ratio was so high.  Of course MTBF was not an allowed spec, and the
target was 1 (one!) component failure for the entire lifespan of a
complete transoceanic cable.  I think the lifespan was 27 years or some
such.

Telecomm companies really know how to spend money in a quest for
reliability.  Of course, at the time, the number that trickled down to
us was $6M a minute lost for downtime, so I guess a few extra million on
construction cost is not significant.