Of all the connectors available in the market today the E-2000®.  holds its own remarkable position. This is a story of three Swiss manufacturers taking on the rest of the world.

Welcome to Building Fibre where we take an inquisitive look at how creating a smart, connected world, is impacting the way we design optical communications infrastructure.

The International Electrotechnical Commission, or the IEC as it’s better known as, is an organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all manner of electrical, electronic and related technologies, collectively known as "electrotechnology". IEC standards cover a vast range but within that range it also includes fibre optics and in particular one specific product that we are going to look at today, the optical connector.

If you read from the Internet the IEC specification 61754 defines the standard interface dimensions for various family types of optical connectors. Basically it explains the design of a particular connector and gives you the drawings and all the critical dimensions so that different manufacturers can each create products that will all work together. That is, of course, given that they have the right to manufacture under the various patents and no doubt agreeable to paying a suitable license fee.

When the Swiss company, Diamond, created their design for an optical connector in the 90’s, it was given the family name of LSH and, I assume that it was the fifteenth version to be approved and issued, as it became designated as IEC 61754-15.

OK, so that’s not the most catchy name so how did the LSH get developed and become the E-2000®?

In 1992, Diamond was asked to develop a new fibre optic connector based on another existing early connector design, but with some improved features. It needed to be constructed of high quality plastic, many connectors at the time were metallic. It needed to have a push-pull mechanism to securely latch the connector in place; incorporate an integrated protective cap, known as a shutter, that covers the end of the connector to stop dust getting in and laser light escaping, and also have some mechanical coding and colour identification as well.

The Diamond engineers set to work and within just a few months designed and developed the connector that we now know as the E-2000®. Initially, the connector was called Europa 2000, a name that was shortened to "E-2000" for simplicity's sake. Diamond then patented the connector and registered the name as a protected brand whereupon demand for the product started to grow and it was distributed around the world.

In what proved to be a very shrewd move, Diamond licensed the design to two other Swiss manufacturers, Huber & Suhner (H&S) and Reichle & de Massari (R&M), but maintained careful control over the branding and patents. With just three official manufacturers it was possible to maintain quality whilst keeping the selling price at levels not possible with other connector types.

Very soon the E-2000® became known as the premium brand for connectivity and was synonymous with supreme quality. The security and safety features ensured that it would become the go-to connector when using high power, and today it can be found around the world in a wide variety of applications, especially for critical data transmission points where reliability is the utmost concern.

The E-2000® design features a 2.5mm ceramic ferrule and, unusually for the time when it was developed, it has a shutter on both the connector and the adapter. This made it very desirable for applications where high power lasers were being used as the shutters protected engineers from accidental exposure from disconnected live circuits. The addition of interchangeable coloured or mechanically coded latches and housing frames, provided clear and secure identification of the trans...