PRE-TEMINATED CABLING
49
2. TCO (total cost of ownership)
Studies have demonstrated time after time that preterminated fibre presents a lower TCO to end users. While
pre-term can carry a premium price, the resulting lower
operational costs create a reduction in the overall TCO,
ensuring pre-terminated fibre is now even more attractive
than before.
3. Multi-fibre links
In the data centre particularly, and now increasingly in
enterprise backbone links, network engineers are deploying
fibre that’s ready for 40Gb/s and even 100Gb/s during the
installation’s lifespan. Where 10Gb/s fibre links require just
one pair of OM3/4 fibres, 40Gb/s requires a link with either:
2, 8, 12, or 24 fibre connections. Most manufacturers are now
producing multi-fibre solutions for OM4 fibre using MPO or
MTP connectors, and the technology has advanced to allow
both 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s to utilise the same multi-fibre
connections into active equipment.
It's generally thought that terminating MPO/MTP
connectors on-site is risky and requires expensive equipment
such as ribbon splicers. This itself is definitely producing a
significant swing towards pre-termination of the patch cords
and permanent links.
Historically, fibre installers have always preferred to terminate
on site. This was perceived as the lower cost and therefore
higher profit approach, despite the requirement for highly
trained fibre technicians and expensive equipment. And
that’s also even after the inevitable re-works due to defective
terminations and splices are resolved. However, there are a
number of factors now making this traditional approach less
acceptable. Let's take a look at them...
4. Loss budgets
Loss-budgets at 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s are a fraction of those
available at 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s. This drives specifiers and
risk-averse data centre operators towards the certainty of
performance obtained with factory terminated, tested and
warranted fibre assemblies, and away from the inevitable
variability of those terminated on site.
1. Short installation time-slots
In data centres, in particular, where an increasing amount of
fibre is being deployed, the pressure to expedite installations
means there simply isn’t the time to make thousands of
terminations at five minutes each. Therefore the greater the
number of fibre connections, the more appealing pre-term
becomes with a potential reduction in installation times of up
to 75% over conventional methods.
Market Trends
After considering the points above, it will come as little
surprise that close to 80% of fibre now deployed in data
centres is pre-terminated. In addition, the same percentage of
pre-terminated data centre fibre assembles use multi-mode
fibre, as opposed to more expensive single-mode.
If we looked back five to ten years, we would see that
field termination accounted for more than 90% of all fibre
www.networkseuropemagazine.com