The changing needs for Fiber Distribution

The Central Office is rapidly becoming a fiber-rich environment, where fiber management is becoming an ever-increasing operational challenge. FTTP initiatives, high bandwidth content services, and remote SAN are increasing the amount of fiber-level transport. Equipment interconnects are converting to optical from copper - virtually all services are now riding optical facilities in the CO, even at the DS-1 level.

Yet it is believed that we have deployed only a fraction of the fiber that is expected in the next 10 years. Today's fiber distribution frame (FDF) technology and procedures to provision, manage and maintain fiber are already reaching fundamental limitations to support future services and infrastructure. The drive for reduced provisioning times, reduced mean time to repair (MTTR), and increased competitive advantage through new offerings are at odds with the existing FDF strategy. The promise of Next Generation SONET equipment, while offering the ability to manage more services and even provide remote optical add/drop, does not fundamentally solve the provisioning issue - manual work is still required in today's FDF model.

Components of Automated Fiber Distribution

In much the same manner that the DCS brought relief to copper and co-ax based services, a new approach is needed to provision and manage fiber-based services. These needs include:

• Remote cross-connect capability through comm. port
• Flow-through provisioning capable via OSS
• Inventory management through automated OSS record-keeping
• Alarming for centralized fault indication
• Signal power monitoring and threshold alarms
• Remote test and link qualification (with RFTS options)

Enabling New Provisioning Models

With these capabilities available, strategies can be implemented that permit more efficient delivery and management of customer services and core transport:

• Shorten provisioning intervals - drastically reduce manual work in the CO, collapsing the time needed to provision and test new circuits
• Reduce human error & network downtime - reduce unnecessary errors introduced during wiring and manual record-keeping entry
• Reduce MTTR - enable rapid and centralized fault isolation and repair or restoration, through built-in monitoring capabilities and ability to guarantee known-good circuits
• Enable new services - cost effectively support optical and Ethernet services to Enterprise customers; provide "time of day" bandwidth capabilities
• Increase revenues - through earlier revenue recognition and increased competitive advantage with faster service delivery

Fiber Distribution & Monitoring Applications

Network Monitoring & Test

Real time network monitoring & test, for backbone and access networks, including PON.

Inter-office Fiber Distribution:

Minimize stranded plant by providing the capability for network-level capacity management without the complexity and danger of manual cut-over.

Intra-office Equipment Cross-connect

Enable flow-through provisioning at the fiber level by inter-connecting service delivery and transport equipment.

Co-location and out-of-franchise points

Remote and controlled access to secure or difficult to reach locations.

Video head-end and content distribution

Provide protection and bandwidth allocation to distributed content servers.

Have someone contact me with more information about Fiber Distribution Applications

Created by PixelMEDIA, Inc.