Its conference season and everyone’s excited, and a little nervous, about getting back together again. Face-to-face. Or will that be Facemask to Facemask.

Once in a while we get asked to deliver fibre connectivity to some pretty remote locations but todays episode is really taking it to the limit.

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

This week the Space-Comm conference takes place at the Farnborough International Exhibition & Conference Centre in Hampshire, UK. For those of you who don’t know, Farnborough has been the main aeronautical and aerospace centre in the UK for many years.

Coincidentally I received and document on the latest project to investigate somewhere a little further afield than normal – in fact 600 Million Km further afield , a project called the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer mission or JUICE for short, and JUICE will study both Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons. Now according to the Internet, Jupiter has 53 named moons and another 26 awaiting official names, that’s 79 moons. So that piqued my interest a little bit, I had to know more…

JUICE is a European Space Agency mission, and is designed to spend at least three years collecting data at Jupiter, and will observe three of the planet’s icy moons: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.

By studying Jupiter and its moons, JUICE will help astrobiologists understand how habitable worlds might emerge around these gas giant planets. The icy moons of Jupiter are also primary targets for astrobiology research in the Solar System. Moons like Europa are believed to harbour oceans of liquid water beneath their icy surfaces, and it is possible that these oceans could be habitable for life as we know it.

As the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun, with the Earth being the third and somewhere in between us is Mars. Because both Earth and Jupiter travel in an elliptical path around the sun, the distance between them is constantly changing. When the two planets are at their closest point, the distance to Jupiter is a mere 365 million miles (588 million Km).

Jupiter has the shortest day of all the planets and rotates on its axis once every nine hours and 55 minutes which means your working hours are short but you don’t get much sleep or leisure time.

It has a very strong magnetic field, around 14 times that found on earth and, not surprisingly, it’s also the largest magnetic field on any planet in the solar system.

JUICE is tasked with finding out more about the magnetic aspect by using an onboard magnetometer, named the J-MAG instrument, which is going to perform planetary sized magnetic field measurements. The magnetometer uses a laser light source and it has an optical sensor located at the tip of a 10.5 m long boom which will be deployed soon after the satellite has been launched. Hence the need for a bit of fibre optic connectivity.

Let’s get some perspective here. Space is a tough environment. It can be both cold and hot and there’s radiation, which is generally considered to be really bad stuff.

As I browse through the paper I’m reading it outlins some of the design challenges that they face, I have to confess, the expected operating conditions in space makes the toughest Earth based fibre deployment look like a gentle walk in the park.

The specification for, what on Earth would be called a patch cord, reads somewhat different when it’s going to fit inside an inter-planetary satellite. Here’s a summary of the scientific bits concerning that particular instrument that will be measuring magnetic fields, the JUICE Magnetometer or J-MAG:

The onboard J-MAG instrument uses a light source in the form of a 795 nm Vertical-Cavity Surface Emitting Laser or VCSEL and a photodetector both of which are located within the satellite body.

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...

Wireless is growing as a share of overall broadband internet connections, but what happens with wireless technology as newer generations are released? Are we ready for these new versions? What about the design of infrastructure networks, have they taken this into account?

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

In this episode we’re going to take a look at the trends in wireless technology and how it might impact current local area networks, and compare the difference between traditional copper and the latest Passive Optical LAN, fibre networks.

If we look back at wireless technology it started in the mid 90’s and for many years people have been saying that everything is going to be wireless.

Back then copper networks, with wired Ethernet ports, were everywhere and the ubiquitous RJ45 connector reigned supreme. Wiring specifications required separate ports for data, voice, printers modems, fax lines, remember them?, and data installation contractors still look back on these times with delight as it was their glory days when the work flowed in and business was good.

As Wi-Fi became much more efficient, more secure and faster, business connectivity turned towards wireless connectivity and today, this is a trend that is going to continue to evolve in the future with every manor of device wanting to connect to the internet without having to be tied to a physical connection.

Now you may think that this just concerns your laptop and mobile phone, and it’s true, these devices led the way to the remote freedom. But following quickly behind is the Internet-of-Things and autonomous vehicles. You can’t build a self-driving car that uses a wired connection to the internet.

Today, everything wants its own wireless internet connection, from home devices such as your doorbell or your refrigerator, to industrial machinery and drones. There are some portions of technology that are holding out such as Point-of-Sale terminals, security cameras and fire or safety systems but even these will eventually transition to wireless once the Standards Committees get their act together and convince everyone that they can operate just as safely without wires.

Looking at the different wireless standards for Wi-Fi as they have evolved over the years, wireless is on a five-year refresh cycle which means you can expect to replace you wireless network every five years.

Wi-Fi uses parts of the radio frequency spectrum to transmit its signals and the spectrum is divided into frequency bands which are labelled in Gigahertz. The higher the frequency in Gigahertz, the faster we can transmit data. Data transmission is measured in bits per second, usually Megabits per second or more recently, Gigabits per second.

If we go back and look at the standards starting with Wi-Fi 4 which IEEE standards authority gave the exciting and memorable title 802.11n, it was adopted in 2008, it operated on the 2.4GHz radio frequency spectrum and it had a maximum data transfer rate of around 600Mbps, which, at the time, seemed like a very good solution. But technology moves fast.

Wi-Fi 5, a.k.a. 802.11ac, was adopted in 2014. It could also operate on the 2.4GHz spectrum but also it used the 5GHz frequency and we saw a great increase in the bandwidth, potentially offering up to nearly 7.0Gbps, which was never really seen in real operating life but this represented a very big jump forward in user bandwidth mainly because we were now working in the 5 GHz spectrum.

Currently we have available Wi-Fi 6, a.k.a. 802.11ax, which was adopted in 2019 and products that use this are starting to be deployed in networks. Wi-Fi 6 is approaching 10 Gigabits per second bandwidth as it utilizes a new part of the sp...

One of the most commonly used and important components in a fibre optic network, doesn’t really do much at all.

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

In this episode we’re taking a closer look at how the light is managed within a fibre network and focusing on one particular component, the passive optical splitter.

A passive fibre optic splitter is a component that does exactly what it says on the box, it splits the fibre and therefore the signal that’s travelling through it, into multiple directions.

Splitters are completely passive networking components, meaning they require no electricity or power to make them operate. If they have no electricity they are not creating any heat so there’s no need to control the climate and no maintenance required whatsoever.

The fibre optic splitter is one of the most commonly used passive devices and splitters are an important part of both the GPON networks that can frequently be found in the telecoms industries, fibre-to-the-home broadband deployments and also within Passive Optical LAN that are found in buildings.

There are two main types of splitters, the first is called the Fused Biconic Taper or FBT, and the second is called the Planar Lightwave Circuit or PLC. The fused Biconic is made by twisting and melting together individual strands of optical fibre whereas the Planar Lightwave is manufactured as an optical chip, much like a computer chip but with a wave guide imprinted upon it. The Fused Biconic can be manipulated into several forms and which have different uses so we will put them to one side for now and start by focusing on the PLC version and take a look at some of the common functions that all splitters types share.

A splitter divides the POWER of the source beam. This means a splitter that, for example, divides into two EQUAL parts, will send 50% of the power down one direction and 50% down the other, without changing the nature of the signal.

Imagine water flowing through a water main and it comes to a Y shaped fitting which divides into two identical sized pipes.  All things being equal the water will divide into two different directions and 50% will go one way and 50% will go the other way.

When we divide a water pipe, we don’t change the character of the water. We don’t inject bubbles into one side and turn the other side into cherry cola.

It’s an important distinction to make because, when we use a splitter to divide the light, we don’t intentionally change the character of the signal, it doesn’t become a different colour or frequency, it just the same signal going in two different directions at slightly less power.

But the reduction of power is a very important consideration that has to be taken into account when calculating overall distance the signal can travel through the network. Every time we introduce a component into an optical network it has an effect of reducing the power passing through, in fact the sheer action of light travelling down a fibre causes the signal to be diminished and when designing any part of the network we must take this into consideration by working out how much power we have to begin with and then calculating the losses as the light passes through the network. We call this the loss budget.

The optical power is measured in decibels commonly referred to as dB, which is a ratio between how much goes in relation to how much comes out. It’s calculated using mathematical formula which give a reading using a logarithmic scale which we don’t want to get into at the moment but suffice to say that when we get a 3dB reduction it means that the signal has been reduces by a half.

At the heart of a PLC Splitter is an optical chip which uses wave ...

Why building communication systems are changing from copper to optical fibre.

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

Communication Industry speak divides up types of work into sectors with similar requirements such as telecoms or data centres or mobile and a specific sector we call Enterprise. When we talk about Enterprise connectivity we are generally referring to commercial buildings and often the surrounding property. This includes office blocks but also hotels, stadium, airports, hospitals, schools, shopping centres, Colleges, Universities, military establishments and government buildings. The area surrounding properties that form part of the same institution is often called a campus and although a campus is often referred to in relation to maybe educational establishments such as a university, it could equally be a business park, shopping mall or military complex.

The industry standard term for a network installation that serves a relatively small area such as a building is a local area network or LAN. There are also wide area networks or WANs and metropolitan area networks or MANs, but fundamentally they are still just building communication systems that vary in size and are linked together in a designated form.

Each and every one of these buildings has a similar but unique cabling requirement, as we have mentioned before many of these building use a structured cabling system to help manage their complexities.

An alternative to structured cabling is often called conventional or point-to-point cabling. This would be where each system has it’s own dedicated data cabling that doesn’t link together with other systems. Disparate systems may be placed around a building and problems arise when these different systems are unable to connect together and communicate with each other.

A structured cabling system has a main distribution area, or communications room, where all the cables in your structured network, come together and provides the infrastructure necessary to deliver modern communications for a building within a campus in a unified and organized manner.

The infrastructure is required to support systems such as voice, data and multimedia regardless of the service provider. The entire structure is thus connected for voice communication, traditionally telephone but now more than ever using mobiles, the transfer of data to smart devices which used to mean computers but now there’s a whole new range of inclusive devices, the transmission of video pictures whether that’s for surveillance like CCTV or for promotional media and digital signage, point-of-sale terminals, through to smart intelligent devices that measure and survey the environment and want to be connected to everything.

It is known as a structured cabling system because it follows laid down rules of design and consists of several subsystems or smaller structures. The installation of structured cables can meet all the needs of telephone and data communication. At the same time, the system is independent of the equipment that uses the cabling.

Enterprise businesses that need to upgrade or replace existing telecommunications networks are looking for ways to improve energy efficiency and reduce capital and operating expenses. But when it comes to deciding on the technical decisions for upgrades and rewiring, we tend to leave that to the technical guys!

Technology managers are looking for solutions that provide high bandwidth while increasing the security and reliability of their networks and are prone to falling back onto the tried and trusted systems that have previously proved their worth. There is a common saying that ”Nobody’s going to sack you for recommending [insert the leading brand here].

Taking a closer look at the optical fibre that’s used to build our communications network.

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

When starting a podcast series that’s fundamentally based around optical fibres, I guess the best place to start is to ask the question “what is an optical fibre?” and why is it so important. An optical fibre can sometimes made of plastic but most often it’s made of glass. But when you explain to people that a cable is made from glass you occasionally get a curious or disbelieving response.

Glass is a remarkable creation, made all the more amazing by a common belief that glass is a tough but fragile material that can be broken with a good, sharp blow. Every-day glass, like a window pane or a bottle is stiff and brittle but when you manufacture glass at a micro scale, where it’s melted and then drawn out into a long thin fibre that’s around the thickness of human hair, it behaves differently, it becomes flexible.

Glass is made of silica and without getting too technical silica is the main constituent of sand. So there’s a fair amount of raw material around and it’s reasonably easy to extract.

Archaeological evidence suggests glass-making dates back to at least 3,600 BC around Mesopotamia, Egypt and Syria with the earliest known objects being glass beads perhaps created accidently during an early metal working process.

Over the years glass has been refined and transformed into an amazing array of functional products and has a great many practical, technological and decorative uses.

From common glass used in the afore mentioned windows and table ware, along with packaging, jewellery, decorative ornaments and sculptures through to technically refined glass where its spectacular properties are employed to create everything from the cladding on immense buildings like sky scrapers or the Shard, down to fine micro fibre glass strands used to make glass wool for building insulation.

But our interest today focuses on the use of glass within the field of communications and the very special part it plays when light passes through it.

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Glass, as a medium, has the property of allowing light to transmit or pass through its structure. But light travels at different speeds depending upon the medium it’s travelling in. Light travels fastest in a vacuum, such as the light that comes from the Sun, which travels at over 182,000 mile per second. But when it hits the Earths atmosphere it changes speed as it passes through the air, a different medium. The speed changes again as the light passes from air to glass and from glass to water and so on.

When light passes from air to glass the speed at which it travels is reduced and if it enters at an angle the direction of the light rays is bent due to an effect called refraction. Each material is said to have a refractive index, a number which tells how the light will react and not only is it different for each material, but it can be controlled by managing the composition of the material, and in our case that’s the glass. If the angle of entry reaches another critical point then the light is not just bent but it’s reflected and we put both of these effects of refraction and reflection to very good use.

Light doesn’t pass through any medium completely unimpeded. Impurities or particles can scatter the light, reducing the amount that gets through and light itself, being an electromagnetic wave, has its own wonderful properties that impacts its progress and occasionally create effects that can defy belief. But more about that in another episode.

You can easily show the effects of  refraction and reflection with a couple of simple experiments.

Virtually all large commercial buildings have a physical data network that allows users to access the communication services that modern businesses need to survive and prosper.