Project Skills Solutions provide a range of cabling services, including fibre optic cable repair, installation and termination.
Fibre Optic Cable Rodent Damage
The urgent call came in that an important communication link on site had failed and required urgent repair. Our fibre optic cable engineers attended site and set about fault finding the fibre optic cable using an OTDR it was possible to work out the exact distance from the test point to where the fibre optic cable had failed. Once this distance was walked the fibre optic cable was exposed and the problem was immediately evident as rodent damage as the cable had been eaten through.
To repair the fault two new 16 core 0m2 fibre optic cables were installed externally and fusion spliced into new pigtails, out in the field two new Tyco Foscc ped caps were installed and heat shrunk down allowing the replacement fibre optic cable to be weatherproof jointed into the existing network cabling.
Project Skills Solutions can install and splice fibre cable in almost any weather conditions thanks to our pop up tents creating a suitable environment to carryout the precision fusion splicing equipment.
Fibre Cabling Repairs
Once installed and spliced, all cables were labelled and tested with the latest OTDR equipment and when found to be working 100% the client brought the communications back on line over the new fibre optic cable. Project Skills Solutions would always specify a CST (Steel Taped armoured cable) when the fibre optic cable runs in an external environment in ducts etc. This prevents rodents from damaging external cables and does not present a significant price increase over standard cables.
Pigtails: A fibre pigtail is an optical fibre that has an optical connector pre-installed on one end and exposed on the other.
OTDR: Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer is used to test fibre optic cable, it can be used to estimate the overall attenuation, including splice and mated-connector losses.
CST: A steel taped armoured cable is designed for cable runs that are at risk of damage from the weather or more commonly rodents.