By: Tom Warren

Many of Clearfield’s MSO customers have considered collapsing certain hub locations. The applications vary but the reason is the same. They want to save money. Electronics manufacturers have miniaturized the EDFA’s, transceivers, Power Supplies and Transponders to a point that they no longer need a physical building to house them. They can now reside in a small node case. This allows the MSO to eliminate the headaches and costs of maintaining a hut or building in the field. They can “collapse” the hub and install a small node case in its place.

A concern with some customers has been fiber protection and management inside these devices. In conventional Head End buildings, a fiber frame would accommodate fiber termination panels, slack management equipment and optical components. To replicate all those functions in an OSP environment Clearfield developed the Hub Collapse Cabinet (HCC). The cabinet is a 16x16x32” pole or pad mount.

The HCC cabinet provides much needed:

• Patch/splice location for service cable(s) and OSP fiber
• Room for up to 32 LGX modules
• Jumper slack management