In most fiber optic construction builds, labor/construction accounts for 70% of the cost of deployment. Equipment costs account for the remaining 30%. Since labor/construction is, by far, the single highest component of a build, anything that reduces this benefits the bandwidth provider. Quicker and easier skilled labor/construction operations are essential to lowering labor costs, which is why preconnectorized solutions have become popular.
Because of these high costs, fiber to the building (FTTB) deployments have changed through the years, involving newer cabling technologies and installation methods. Original FTTB deployments were built like the following:
Bulk cables were organized at an OSP splice closure. The cables could be mid-spanned to provide access to the desired fibers. All affected fibers and components - including any WDMs, splitters and drop cable fibers - could be hard-spliced in the closure. While this method works, it is time consuming and labor intensive. Closure organization is conducted while splicing and must be thorough. Not only must the fibers be spliced at the splice closure, but if bulk drop cable is used, the fibers entering the building must be terminated via splicing or direct connectorization in a wall mount or rack mount patch panel. While this method is highly configurable, it is also time consuming in terms of deployment and restoration…adding cost to the project through a high amount of skilled field labor.
Clearfield® offers a preterminated solution through our YOURx™-Terminal. An advantage of this solution is that it limits the amount of splicing done in the OSP splice closure and removes remaining splicing downstream of the closure. Consider the following diagram:
In a preterminated solution, only the trunk fibers that must be accessed are spliced. All other components - including WDMs, splitters, drop cables and ISP hardware - arrive as connectorized assemblies. Many are already integrated into the products, so no assembly is required. This serves several purposes:
- Limiting all splicing to the closure and drastically reducing the number of splices required.
- All components come pretested and are quickly deployed by lower skilled labor.
- Restoration and deployment velocity are faster because the system is plug-and-play. You will realize a higher equipment cost, but will lower your labor costs. Those costs are not an even trade-off because they start with such a huge difference in terms of project percentage. This system also provides the ability to “daisy chain” terminals, allowing you to spread out your field components to accommodate a larger geographic and diverse area.
- No configurability is lost by using pre-connectorized products.
Now consider a service area in which the bandwidth provider has a trunk cable passing along a route and has either a single or multiple customers who would like to take service, but are in a relatively compact area. In this instance, the YOURx Multi-Purpose Terminal (MPT) is the ideal solution, as it is designed to combine the ability to mid-span and splice your trunk fiber to components and drop cables, all in a single, inexpensive unit.
With the MPT, we can mid-span any cable that is .70 inches or below in diameter to access fibers, but then splice them directly into our components that are pre-connectorized and preloaded in the terminal. This lowers the labor/construction and equipment cost of deploying multiple units in the multi-tenant unit (MTU) environment. It also provides the ability to deploy pre-connectorized products into the business, which makes for fast deployment, restoration and testing.
If you want to know more about how our terminals save costs, please reach out to Clearfield. We’re happy to help.
By Bill Sawyer
Bill Sawyer has a rich and varied career in the field of telecommunications. A degreed aerospace engineer, Bill has served the CATV, IXC, CLEC and wireless markets for 25 years with positions including Field, Systems and Application Engineering.
As a Clearfield Application Engineer, Bill assists the CATV MSO market in all aspects of FTTx deployments with specific emphasis on face-to-face technical issues such as installation, design guidance, product selection and problem resolution.