Procedure

Technical Report

Overview

This Technical Report is a practice-oriented document describing the cleaning of fibre optic patch cables, transmission lines as well as active and passive components with connectors. Patch cables are intended to interconnect active components or to connect active components to fibre optic transmission lines. They present a wear part in optical fibre communication systems and thus represent a failure-relevant part in optical fibre communication systems. This cable is present in many areas of today's communication technology. Mobile/cellular phone calls are transferred via fibre optic routes from the transmitter and receiver stations to landlines; the connections of the network nodes of the telecommunication network and also modern DSL and data highways would be impossible without these fast transmission lines. In order to satisfy the ever-growing demand for bandwidths of companies and private users, entire computer centres are being equipped with more and more parallel multimode routes. The currently introduced fibre-to-the-home projects, by which these glass fibre networks are extended to the end user, increase the range of bandwidth necessary in the computer centre. This makes it even more important to ensure quality of the passive optical network components present in this environment. This Technical Report is intended to refer to the need for cleaning fibre optic connections as well as describing some of the current tools and methods available for cleaning. In addition, this report includes specifications for practices that are not recommended. This Technical Report explains the need to visually inspect plug endfaces but it does not address the inspection criteria which are covered in another standard. This standard is directed at anyone involved in the installation, operation, acceptance or troubleshooting of optical networks. The responsible Committee is Subcommittee 412.7 "LWL-Verbindungstechnik und passive optische Komponenten" ("Fibre optic interconnecting devices and passive optical components") of the DKE (German Commission for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies) at DIN and VDE.

Document: references other documents

Responsible national committee

DKE/UK 412.7 - LWL-Verbindungstechnik und passive optische Komponenten