Put Her Out to Pasture

We’ve been together for over 6 years, and covered a lot of ground together, night and day, many miles behind us. She’s been a faithful, trustworthy and reliable companion. I know what you are thinking. No, she wasn’t high maintenance. Hardly cost me anything to keep her happy and healthy. But the time had come to put her out to pasture.

It’s not what you think. I’m actually talking about my CAR! I finally gave up my 2005 Honda Accord. 500,000 miles and

Posted 01/31/12 12:25 PM by Admin

Pit Bull

Today, I visited one of our customers. We needed to do some work at 2 on their 70 PON cabinets that they have in service. I sat down with one of their engineers and discussed the scope of work. He seemed a little stressed and told me he was pretty busy. I said, “You stay and work, I can do it.” He turned to me and said, “I trust you Jim, you don’t need me to chaperone.” That is one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid. He gave me the two

Posted 12/23/11 8:40 AM by Admin

A Little Shaky

I’ve lived with it all my life, shaky hands. But in the last few years it has become a little worse, now my head shakes some times. The doctors tell me the medical term for it is “tremors”, and there’s nothing to worry about. It could be I’m getting a little older, maybe all the coffee I drink, or both those things. I have some tricks I’ve learned to make it less noticeable. When I was a CO Tech at US West and had to work on small electrical

Posted 12/14/11 9:35 AM by Admin

Clearfield - Straight Up, No Spin.

I recently traveled to South Dakota to play some golf with a friend of mine. The day before, I checked the weather forecast and it said a "high of 70 and breezy". Hey that sounded pretty good. When I got to the course in the central part of the state that afternoon, they had the temperature right, but breezy? It was 25 mph sustained and 40 mph gusts. Limbs were flying off trees! The last several times I played, I had been feeling pretty good about my game with

Posted 11/11/11 1:23 PM by Admin

Telecom Trail—Simply Amazing

Yes, many of us who have been in the Telecommunications Industry since "before fiber optics" often look at what our industry is doing now as simply amazing. Yes, there are some of us who remember when the only thing glass in the network were the insulators on the cross arms! The young IT-IP Gurus involved in telecom today probably wonder what we’re talking about but that’s ok. It just shows how "simply amazing" our industry was, is, and likely will continue to be.

Posted 10/31/11 11:09 AM by Admin

Pull the Trigger

I’m a big Glock guy; I own three, two G19s and a G26. Glock designed their revolutionary polymer frame back in the 1980s. Their guns have a brilliantly simple design; I can field strip mine in under 10 seconds. The true visionary genius is its polymer frame. Its lightweight strength has been copied by many other manufacturers over the years -- Kahr, Sig, Springfield to name a few, but Glock was the first. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Carried by military

Posted 10/26/11 1:17 PM by Admin

The Blunt Tool

In economics there are a couple of policies the government uses to try to stabilize the economy; Fiscal and Monetary policy. Fiscal Policy includes the size of the deficit, tax policy, and government spending. Monetary Policy seeks to control the value of currency through interest rates and the amount of money in circulation. (Currently, the US is printing it and throwing it out of helicopters). Most economists agree that monetary policies set by the Federal Reserve

Posted 10/17/11 7:26 AM by Admin

Good Once

I really look forward to the rare times I get to work in the field with our customers. Just the other day I had one of those opportunities. I’m not as young as I used to be and will be turning 53 later this year. North Carolina in the summer is a bit warm and the day I scheduled to do some outside work with our customer was 100 degrees with 70% humidity. I probably should have waited till fall. With age comes wisdom. We decided as warm as it was going to get we

Posted 09/28/11 5:34 PM by Admin

Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

We are starting to see a large uptick in sales of Passive CWDM and DWMD products. These products are truly revolutionary and have the capability of saving our customers millions of dollars in new construction dollars. Imagine if you were able to suddenly make the congested two lane route that you drive to work into a sixteen lane super highway without having to tear up the existing road or add more blacktop. That is what CWDM’s are capable of doing. By simply

Posted 08/17/11 3:12 PM by Admin

Sole Survivor

There are a lot of places underwater in our country this spring and it sounds like it won’t dry out any time soon. My thoughts and prayers to all the families affected by the flooding this year

I had a meeting with one of my customers today and they told me about one of their telco clients that has some major flooding in one of their exchanges.

The Missouri River has swallowed up a whole lot of land including some of their PON cabinets. Some techs were going out to

Posted 06/13/11 1:45 PM by Admin

Telecom Code

B-O-G-B-S-W-R-B-Y-V-R-A

(Blue-Orange-Green, Brown, Slate, White, Red, Black, Yellow, Violet, Rose, Aqua)

We sure do have our own secret language, don’t we? (SC, LC, APC, UPC)

Talk to our friends or family about what we do in Telecom Code and you may get some eyes that cross. (End-face geometry, Insertion & Return Loss)

I was giving a tour of our manufacturing area a few days ago where my oldest daughter works. She was putting together some 288 count fiber panels.

Posted 06/02/11 7:52 AM by Admin

Buyer Beware

An old friend has hung up his holster and gun, and thrown his badge in a drawer. With a stroke of a pen, the RUS List of Materials was put out to pasture this week.

I have to tell you this feels pretty strange. Ensuring that our products at Clearfield are “Listed” has been a big part of my job over the past 6 years. This was such an essential accomplishment for our product line in order to serve our Independent Telco customers. Where do we go from here?

New

Posted 05/31/11 6:54 PM by Admin

Today

It’s gonna be a long one. Thank God that McDonalds was open at 5am for my large black coffee and I had my first cigar before 7am - breakfast of champions.

It’s gonna be a long one. I have 600 miles to cover; the sun came up over my left shoulder and will see it set over my right. I’m headed to Nebraska with a couple of stops today.

It’s gonna be a good one. My meetings today aren’t just with customers, they are my friends. Yes we have some FTTH projects

Posted 05/11/11 3:13 PM by Admin

Size Matters

I was driving through rural Minnesota earlier this spring and as I slowed down for one of the many small towns along my route, I noticed a sign that read “Bejou next 7 exits”. Someone in that town has a great sense of humor. It wasn’t hard to see the true size of Bejou. This town maybe had 100 people in it and those 7 exits mentioned on the sign were the only 7 streets in the town. There was a grain elevator on the left and those 7 streets to the right (7

Posted 05/03/11 12:54 PM by Admin

Tax Man

Ah - April 15th (well April18th this year) is here again. Don’t get me wrong I’m OK with paying my fair-share of taxes. The problem is the government has made it so complicated that no one even knows what that is anymore. Fair-share…ha

There are now more than 55,000 pages in Tax Rules. I am a reasonably intelligent guy but because I own a farm I have to pay a CPA $250 every year to figure out my taxes. There are about 1.2 million tax preparers in the US

Posted 04/19/11 2:42 PM by Admin

Magic

Last weekend I was standing at the top of the bleachers looking down on the trainer working on my daughter about 30 minutes before the NJCAA National Championship game. When he put on surgical gloves and pulled out a scalpel, all that did was add to the tension already growing in the arena and in the pit of my stomach. I yelled down to Steph with a questioning look on my face and she replied “It’s OK Dad, he’s just going to pop my blister” (That had developed

Posted 03/18/11 3:03 PM by Admin

Do More With Less

It is an old business cliché. To many engineers “Do More with Less” is one of the most dreaded phrases in the English language. Engineers that I talk with in the MSO industry have been dealing with this issue for several years. With lean business models, they are being tasked with completing more projects with fewer engineers and resources. They are also being asked to accomplish more things (Fiber to the Business, Cell Backhaul, RFOG, and Node Segmentation)

Posted 02/28/11 4:42 PM by Admin

Live Like You’re Dying

I lost a friend last week. His name is Bruce and we worked together over the past few years at Clearfield. Although I'm rarely in the office with my fierce travel schedule, when I was, there were very few days we didn't have a chance to take the time to talk for a while.

Bruce was in finance and I am in engineering. We would be talking about golf, cars, or the fun of paying for our kids college education. When the boss would walk by Bruce would start to throw in

Posted 02/25/11 2:04 PM by Admin

A Letter To You

Dear Bruce,

Our chairman of the board today talked about the uncertainty of life and how much that rang true when you left us last week to walk with our Lord.

The uncertainty and suddenness of your departure slapped a memory of a distant friend, Joel Zahorski, who made the walk you are walking now when I was a junior in High school, and a song. The song was called "Don't know what you got" (till it's gone). Inside joke about big-hair bands that I will forever

Posted 02/25/11 1:56 PM by Admin

Absolute Zero

January in Minnesota can be brutal. Last week I was cutting wood on my farm in the northern part of the state with my uncle. The high for the day was 0F and the low that night was -23F.

Cutting wood with my Stihl-Wood Boss chainsaw, knee deep snow in a river bottom, yes I enjoy that. That got me thinking about one of my other “hobbies”, physics.

I’ll bet most people think there are only 3 states of matter, Solid, Liquid, and Gas. Atoms at high temperatures

Posted 02/08/11 9:36 PM by Admin

All your eggs in one basket

When I worked for Fujitsu in the 1990s they bet on the "Centralized Processing" model. They built a monster Core ATM switch. It had scores of OC-48c pipes feeding it. Fujitsu, the first manufacturer to build SONET multiplexers, doesn't make many wrong calls, but they sure missed on that one. "Distributed Processing" with the power closer to the edge definitely won out.

The same philosophy will win at your company. Hire good people (smart, hard-working,

Posted 01/27/11 2:45 PM by Admin

Old Dog-New Trick

This old War Horse doesn’t tweet. I never thought I would write a blog either and I was certain no one would read it if I did. After some persistent coaxing from my boss, I started writing about my travels and experiences working for Clearfield.

A Social Networking website for the Telecommunications industry? Are you kidding me? You all are just like me, right? Don’t have time for that, even if you knew what a Social Networking site was. Hey, I guess I was

Posted 01/27/11 2:41 PM by Admin

Eating Crow

Back in 1997 when I graduated from college I started working at a company called CSP which was a little cable assembly house in Plymouth, MN. It was right down the street from another company called Optical Solutions. They were working on this new technology that used optical splitters to deliver broadband over fiber to residential customers. They were talking about crazy things like splicing optical splitters in the OSP and splicing a jumper into a box on the side

Posted 11/29/10 3:52 PM by Admin

Closed on Sundays

Closed on Sundays One of the things I most look forward to when I travel south out of Minnesota is Chic-fil-A. They have the best chicken sandwich I have ever tasted and with the waffle fries and a chocolate shake; perfection. My friends in the southern part of the United States know what I am talking about. I am glad to see franchises starting to spring up farther north (Kansas City, Denver). It’s not just the food; they have quality, friendly employees. I have

Posted 11/19/10 5:00 PM by Admin

Superstars

Back in the early 1990s I was a CO Supervisor at US West. I had a crew of 12 Technicians, 10 on the day shift, 1 on evenings and 1 on nights. Together we covered the Minneapolis Downtown Central Office which is one of the largest in the country. We worked on equipment ranging from OC-48 fiber transport, Digital Cross Connects to SLC and Channel Banks even a UNIX based system that allowed our customers to remotely configure their own T1s. We had over 30 different

Posted 11/19/10 4:56 PM by Admin

Hero

I have very few, none of them professional athletes. Not one on TV or radio. Each one has a characteristic I admire and strive to emulate. Here are 5 individuals that inspire me every day.

My Dad (Hard Work) he grew up during the Depression, farmed with horses, and with an 8th grade education and an iron work ethic, raised a family of 5. Once when I was fixing something on my car, he asked “where did you learn to do that?” I said “you taught me”. You

Posted 11/19/10 4:28 PM by Admin

The Rut

The bodies are starting to pile up alongside the roads. From the middle of October to mid-November the evidence of the change in nature is clear. When you make your living on the road, you notice these things. When you drive as many miles as I do per year, you would be a fool not to adjust your driving habits during this month of danger. Of all the states I drive through, Wisconsin has the most of these furry, mobile, roadside drive-bys. The Whitetail chase is on.

Posted 10/20/10 8:36 PM by Admin

Goodbye Five 9s

In telecom, 5-9s is defined as the average uptime in any given 365 day period – 99.999%. (Count them, 5 – 9s) That’s 364.99635 days up and roughly 5 minutes, 15 seconds downtime in a year. This has been a standard for telecom equipment and network reliability for decades. For you data-heads out there, you probably don’t even know what I am talking about. The data world uses terms like Available bit rate (ABR) and “Best Effort”.

5-9s as the “Gold

Posted 10/20/10 8:32 PM by Admin

Old War Horses

We have a lot of scars, each one a lesson learned. In every gray hair, we carry a story and an experience that is invaluable. I am privileged to lead the Application Engineering group at Clearfield. We have 5 War Horses in my group with a combined 145 years in the Telecom industry.

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a guy new to the road. He was recently assigned to travel with Sales which involves long days of driving. He asked “Jim, when you drive all

Posted 10/14/10 2:22 PM by Admin

Let’s Talk

Back in the early 1980’s I was in a television commercial. I worked for Northwestern Bell and they started a marketing campaign that they called “Let’s Talk”. It featured the “regular” people at the company (Service Reps, Clerks, and Technicians) and promoted the idea we were there to help our customers. I was a 22 year old pup at the time and although it was cool to be in a TV commercial (hey I got to wear my tool belt), I thought it was kind of corny.

Posted 10/14/10 2:17 PM by Admin

Blood and Sweat

The majority of my work at Clearfield is discussing and designing fiber networks with Consulting Engineers. We work together to design current projects and also discuss what technologies the industry is migrating to. Most of my meetings are in office conference rooms, white boards and paper. Occasionally I get the opportunity to get out in the field, and get my hands dirty. This week was one of those treats. We have a customer that purchased one of our Pedestal

Posted 10/14/10 2:15 PM by Admin

Zippo

Fuel, Wick, and Spark – simple. Built to last - stainless steel case, rugged - quality hinge. Wear out a flint, replace it. I’ve had my classic Zippo lighter for over 20 years and it works as it did from the day I got it. Only a few scratches on the case, just like me.

Tom is a farmer in Southern Minnesota and a friend of mine. We were golfing a couple of weeks ago and he was limping a bit on a new knee he just had replaced 3 months earlier. After a lifetime

Posted 10/13/10 8:33 PM by Admin

Pork

Bacon is the hot menu item on the minds of many telephone companies that have been awarded Broadband Stimulus funds.

The Davis-Bacon Act states: "The US Department of Labor determines wage rates to be paid on federally funded or assisted construction projects". The wage schedule listed on the Government website in many areas of the country is 2-3 times higher than what is normally paid to contractors.

One of our customers told me "it would be like requiring that

Posted 09/08/10 4:55 PM by Admin

America Still Builds

I am a motor-head, I love cars. I also like a good television commercial, but the good ones are so rare. There are a couple of recent commercials that really caught my eye.

The first is simple and only has 11 words in it. It is for the 2010 Dodge Challenger. The scene starts out with a squad of British Red-Coats marching across a field. A British scout comes running to warn them that the Americans are coming and as they get set to shoot, George Washington comes

Posted 09/02/10 12:58 PM by Admin

Nickels and Dimes

I spent a couple of days in the Chicago area last week. Normally I go around it when I am travelling SE from Minnesota. I take I39 south through Rockford, IL., hit I80 and head straight East. That route is a little longer drive but I can avoid all but 2 toll booths. Last week was different, I had meetings in the NW suburbs of Chicago. If anyone out there can tell me how to avoid all of those tolls without driving on side streets and gravel roads, please let me know.

Posted 08/06/10 11:58 AM by Admin

Service With a Smile

A few weeks ago my wife brought the family vehicle in for repairs. There were several items we wanted checked out so when the garage called back with an estimate we braced ourselves for what we thought would be a hefty repair bill. The list ends up being pretty long and includes manifold seals, some work on the cooling system and front brakes. They said the rear brakes were fine and didn't need to be replaced. Total tab: about $1200.

We had the vehicle back for just a

Posted 07/23/10 5:01 PM by Admin

Dinosaurs vs. Mammals

There are many theories on why the Dinosaurs disappeared from earth 65 million years ago. (An asteroid that hit the Yucatan peninsula, a super nova, climatic changes that raised the oxygen content in the atmosphere which increased their metabolic rate, disease carrying insects, increased volcanic activity, even that the slow moving, dim-witted dinosaurs couldn’t cope with the mammals stealing their eggs).

Not that it matters, but I’m in the asteroid camp.

No

Posted 07/22/10 2:06 PM by Admin

Get In Early

You would think with as much as I travel this would happen more often. I guess I have been lucky. Traveling up from Colorado to North Dakota today I almost got caught. I usually don't make my hotel reservations until later in the day when I know where I want to stop, it depends on how tired I am and where I have to be the next morning. I started making calls while I was still in Wyoming; I was pretty sure I could make it to Dickinson, North Dakota. 9:30 wouldn't be

Posted 07/22/10 1:48 PM by Admin

Common Ground

My oldest daughter works the second shift (1:30-9:30) in Manufacturing at Clearfield. (We fire up a second shift when we get busy, and we are definitely busy.) She is a college student working hard to help her Dad pay for her tuition. She mainly does Fiber Check which is a manual process of verifying the quality of fiber end-faces. She plugs a connector into a device that magnifies at 400X and runs a computer program that determines a passing or failing end-face.

Posted 07/09/10 12:48 PM by Admin

Old School

I just bought a 1970 Jeep Commando. My latest project, I love working on the old stuff. Simple, mechanical, and no on-board computers. It has a Buick 225 ci V6 motor and a 3 speed manual transmission. I plan to lift it, put in a Weiand intake manifold, headers, and a Flowmaster dual exhaust. It needs some body work, but since it’s a western Colorado Jeep, it has very little rust. If it was a Minnesota vehicle it would probably look like Swiss cheese. I’m

Posted 07/08/10 1:48 PM by Admin

Fresh Cut Alfalfa

I’m a country boy at heart. Grew up on a farm where I baled more than my share of hay. So when I’m driving across the country and catch a whiff of an alfalfa field that has just been cut, memories of my childhood come rushing back in. Those memories are bittersweet.

Back then life was good, drove a 1971 Ford pickup, a 360 V8 with a supercharger. Gas was 58 cents a gallon and I could burn through a set of rear tires every summer. I’m not going to lie to you;

Posted 07/01/10 6:42 PM by Admin

Synchronicity

If you have read any of my blogs in the past you know that I travel all over the country. You also know that I drive most of the time given that my meetings are usually spread out and it’s the most efficient way for me to make my meetings with the demo equipment that I need to show my customers. In one of my many trips through Iowa I noticed one night that all the obstruction lights on a wind turbine farm were synchronized.

That got me thinking; I have nothing

Posted 06/30/10 4:25 PM by Admin

The Human Element

Have you seen the Dow Corporation commercial? It talks about the Human Element of their company. The commercial portrays the human affects that this Science and Technology company has on people around the world. They even created an element symbol, ala, Periodic Table of Elements, (Hu) Human.

I was having a conversation with the General Manager of a Telephone Company in North Dakota. They offer triple-play services over new FTTH networks in four of their

Posted 06/16/10 2:20 PM by Admin

Timing is Everything

I’m driving down the freeway through the great state of Michigan near the end of a long day. When I pulled off the interstate my car started running rough and it stalled at the bottom of the exit ramp. Start and stall, start and stall, luckily I was able to limp it a half a mile to my hotel. Being a backyard mechanic, I’m thinking fuel pump or one of the many sensors (O2, throttle position sensor, cam shaft position sensor) that are critical on late model cars.

Posted 06/16/10 2:01 PM by Admin

In The Club

I’ve joined the club. West Central Telephone Association just today cut me over from copper to their new FTTH network.

There are a couple of odd circumstances that stand out to me in the event. The first is where it is. I’m not sure I would have guessed that I would have FTTH at my farm house, in very rural Minnesota, before my home in a Minneapolis suburb. Secondly, I’ve been in the telecom industry for 32 years and the last 5 of that have been very

Posted 04/27/10 1:13 PM by Admin

Torque

“Horsepower sells cars, but torque wins races” – Carroll Shelby

In physics, Newton’s Second Law states: Net force acting upon an object causes acceleration directly proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass.

Guess what, not only are we finally getting movement with Broadband Stimulus, we are getting acceleration. Several BIP and BTOP projects have been successfully awarded from Round 1 and we just completed the Round 2

Posted 04/06/10 1:29 PM by Admin

Keep Your Balance

As a kid I grew up on a horse farm. We raised, trained, and showed Quarter Horses. When I was in my early teens I would break and rough-train horses (saddle-break, neck rein) and such. I would spend a couple of weeks with each horse all for a whopping $50. I guess that was a lot of money for a 13 year-old in 1972.

Anyway, I’ll get to the point. We had a fence made from 4x4 posts and 2x6 rails that ran the full length of the front side of our pasture. It was

Posted 02/19/10 5:56 PM by Admin

Content is Not King

You may have heard the phrase "Content is King". This can be in reference to website content or more often media content ( TV shows or movies). Some very large companies must agree with that philosophy. Comcast agreed in December to purchase NBC. Comcast wants to own the content (although I'm sure they could get by without MSNBC )

You have recently seen squabbling between Cablevision and HGTV and the Food Network. Cablevision blacked-out those 2 channels from

Posted 02/19/10 5:46 PM by Admin

The Road Ahead

I've got a cigar lit and a hot cup of coffee in my cup holder. Driving through Iowa like I've done a hundred times before. But this day in January I'm fighting my way through a thick blanket of fog. Its hard to see more than a few hundred yards ahead. Got my cruise set on 70 and I can't see what's over that next hill. Maybe a semi pulled over to the side of the road? Or one of those infamous Iowa State Troopers?

I've got to believe this is the way many

Posted 01/18/10 7:48 PM by Admin

It Could Be Tricky

I was driving across Minnesota last month, wind blowing from the north. I swear the snow was coming all the way from Manitoba.

I stopped at a rest stop to calm my nerves and take a five minute break to get the blood flowing back through my white knuckles.

On the way out the door I stopped for a minute to talk with an older gentleman that was mopping up the sloppy mess being tracked into the lobby. He asked, " How are the roads?" "Spots are pretty slick" I shared.

Posted 11/11/09 5:41 PM by Admin

How Much Speed Do You Need ?

How much speed do you need?

I only have a few vices. No drinking or gambling for me. I do like a good cigar, but my passion is fast cars and motorcycles.

Do you think 6 motorcycles and 4 cars is enough? Ha!

One of my rockets is a Yamaha VMax, 145 horsepower V4, 140 MPH in the quarter mile. Is that fast enough? Ya I think so.

How much speed do you need to your house? Is 2.4 gb/s GPON with 1x32 splitters delivering(75mb/s) per house fast enough?

We have all been

Posted 11/11/09 4:13 PM by Admin

The Perfect Carrier

It doesn't get any better than glass and light, right?

Einstien theorized nothing can exceed the speed of light.

Recently, some theoretical physicists are disputing that.

Matched/paired atoms on opposite sides of the earth have been proven to react simultaneously when one or the other is stimulated. Instant communication, pretty cool, that's Quantum physics. Einstein called it "scary science". Niels Bohr and Albert disagreed on this "Principle of

Posted 11/11/09 3:57 PM by Admin

Houses On Stilts

As I was driving across the snow-swept Great Plains of South Dakota, roads were glazed with ice. I drove down Gulf Coast of Texas through Houston to the prettiest little island you'd ever see (Port Aransas, TX). After my short ferry ride to the island, the first thing I noticed was the houses were on stilts. Makes sense with the hurricanes and high water I'm sure that are not an uncommon occurrance there. What a beautiful and diverse country we are blessed to live

Posted 10/22/09 6:37 PM by Admin

Too Busy ?

Almost everyone I have met with over the past few years say the same thing. “We are really busy, but it sure beats the alternative.” Those of us that have been in the telecom industry for more than 15 years have seen this before. The mid-to-late nineties were a crazy time in our industry too. We also survived the lean times shortly after the telecom bust in the early 2000s.

I sometimes wonder, if not for some small decisions early in life, what I would be

Posted 10/22/09 6:10 PM by Admin

Change is Good

We’ve all heard it said that ‘change is good for us’. When I was a youngster I remember my mother telling me that a spoon full of cod liver oil is ‘good for you’ ….but that didn’t help it go down any easier. We’ve also heard it said that if we aren’t careful we can get ‘stuck in a rut’ and that ‘a rut is just a grave with the ends kicked out’.

I wonder if Judge Greene had all the changes we’ve seen in the market place in mind when he

Posted 09/25/09 2:26 PM by Admin

The Collapsing of a Network

Over the past 20 years we have seen a continuous collapse of network electronics from specialized functionality and rigid configuration rules into scalable multi service access and transport platforms. The result include economic benefits like reduced acquisition costs and ongoing operating expenses.

But what about infrastructure? Too often it conforms to the old rules of fixed networks, services and little or no scalability. With the massive investment of fiber going

Posted 09/25/09 2:22 PM by Admin

Gift Horse

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” We’ve all heard that saying and it makes sense that when someone gives you something it could be considered rude to examine that gift too closely. Since it’s a gift, it’s free, right?

I’ve been meeting with folks across the country and the hot topic over the past few months is the Broadband Stimulus Package. When are the rules coming? What will they look like? How can this benefit my company and my community?

Posted 09/25/09 2:11 PM by Admin

CHEMICAL RESISTANCE

When considering the realities of OSP cable, chemical resistance must be addressed.  The world is a nasty place, and fuels, oils and other kinds of chemicals can enter an OSP enclosure despite the best efforts of service providers and their technicians.  While inside-rated jumpers will degrade when exposed to such substances, cables meeting MIL-PRF 85045 are fully resistant.

Some telcos’ standard field practices include fogging a fiber distribution pedestal, cabinet

Posted 08/28/09 3:48 PM by Admin

PEOPLE-PROOFING

Environmental factors are just part of the practical hurdles not fully addressed by OSP standards.  The number one cause of fiber optic network downtime is equipment damage resulting from human error, either through rough handling or improper cable routing.  Even the best-designed fiber solutions can be easily compromised by routing and handling fiber circuits incorrectly.

While most technicians are both highly trained and diligent, interconnect cable must be able to

Posted 08/28/09 3:47 PM by Admin

FTTH-OSP Standards Lag Reality

One of the continuing ironies of Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) interconnect cable products is that while a great deal of effort has been expended to develop optical components that perform well under harsh conditions, many of the materials and specifications essential to these products—despite the environmental, routing and physical handling demands found in FTTH enclosures—are better suited to indoor applications.

Outside Plant (OSP) equipment such as fiber

Posted 08/28/09 3:45 PM by Admin

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