A jointly produced white paper from Superior Essex and OFS leverages shared field experience and combines laboratory studies from each company to investigate the realities of fusion splicing single-mode fiber in today’s FTTH environments. The white paper discusses the results and implications of the companies' findings, while providing practical guidelines for network planners and designers as well as splicing contractors and technicians.
An abstract of the paper is as follows:
"As FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home) deployments proliferate and voice, data, and video networks converge, an increasing amount of optical fiber is being fusion spliced. Once viewed as art as much as science, fusion splicing has become much more routine due to improvements in the fiber itself and the development of highly sophisticated and automated fusion splicing equipment.
Despite the advances in fiber and fusion splicing technology, there are still many aspects of splicing of which practitioners must remain aware. Differences in fibers, equipment, environment and technique can yield different splice loss results. Understanding fusion splice process capability and splice loss measurement will ensure that network owners, designers, contractors, and technicians have realistic expectations of splice loss, especially with the new generation of bend-insensitive single mode fibers that are becoming popular.
This paper provides an overview of fusion splicing and highlights areas that users should be aware of. It discusses what to expect when performing splice loss measurements and offers guidance and rules of thumb for establishing acceptance criteria. This way, all parties with vested interest in the installation --designers, contractors, installers and owners, can be assured that the network will perform as expected."