On 2/1/06, Chris Johnston <cmjohnston@gmail.com> wrote:
> This may be a stupid question and cost may be the answer, but why does fiber
> almost always seem to be run underground?
>From experience, we have had several problems with our fiber... all of
them were environmental because it runs above ground. All of the
below incidents have happened in only 4 years of running on it.
1) Heat/Solar radiation correlation with dropouts. Bell South did not
want to believe it until I showed them a matlab plot of dropouts over
an 8 month period which EXACTLY correlated with daily max temp and
solar radiation. After they put a OTDR on the circuit and stood there
for a couple of hours watching for the break to happen, they believed
me. It was ~1 mile from the termination on my end. It turned out to
be not enough slack in the splice box on the pole. The splice box and
the fiber expand and contract at different rates, so on the tail end
of the mac temp, the fiber would contract and pull at a 90 degree
angle on the post it was wrapped on.
2) a log truck caught our fiber along with the Charter Communications
backbone (12 pair and 48 pair respectively). If any of you remember a
long outage on Charter broadband and digital cable about 6-7 months
ago, this was it. Most of south LA was out. If memory serves, it was
not long before Katrina.
3) a pole broke taking our fiber with it. This case did not cause an
outage, but the snapped off section of pole was steadily stretching
our fiber to the ground.
Burying it, short of a backhoe, means no real chance of an outage
except for electronics (end points)
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Received on 02/03/06
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