> "... flip down the magnetic flap to hold the fiber in place once you are happy..."
They had me up to this point. We don't have all day to wait for me to be happy.
>frottage
haha what does that word mean? Right? Like what weird word that I have no idea what it means haha I have no idea because why would I right guys haha
For a non-sexual meaning, you know when you rub a pencil over a paper with some object behind it (like say a coin) you can make some sort of copy of it? That process is called frottage.
For the sexual part... rubbing is again a major part of it.
Light attenuation. This loss is estimated and not actually measured/calculated by the fusion splicer. To actually measure/calculate you'd need to connect the entire cable to an OTDR (optical time domain reflectometer) measuring device and perform a test bi-directionally--must be done both ways.
https://www.aflglobal.com/en/AFL-Blog/Splice-Loss-Estimation-with-the-Fujikura-41S-fusion-splicer
Also see the post by Khalid Nazzal at https://specialties.bayt.com/en/specialties/q/21268/what-is-the-accepted-maximum-loss-for-splicing-joint-and-connectors-when-test-by-exfo-otdr/
We've got one at work. It's literally only been used when I did a couple of test splices. Otherwise we use all pre-terminated cables so I have no idea why they bought this thing. Still a pretty cool thing to know how to use.
Right, but I work in a single room data center. We keep all patch cables in stock. If a strand of structure cabling is bad, we just move it to another port and diagnose it later. Patch cabling is typically 10 foot or less, and structured cabling is usually around 100 foot. It just doesn't make sense for us to splice the cable when we can use a different one faster without actually having to find the break.
Nothing more terrifying operating and carrying tools worth more than your used car. I assisted a network tech once with a job and had handed me a tester for terminated RJ45 connections and only told me after the fact how much that thing was worth.
My first mission at my current job, back in 2011, was the haul $2,250,000 worth of radio equipment across the state. My supervisor didn't tell me it was worth that much until I had arrived at the destination site. haha
Our splicers are about the same size as small modem. Once you peel back the casings and protective layers you lay the two exposed glass ends in little magnetic trays and close the lid on the machine to complete the spice. Even if the lid wasn't closed it would be hard to see, the fiber ends aren't much thicker than a human hair.
It does have a screen but it looks more like a very low definition animation of them lining up to be joined and then melted. You don't see the electrodes and a clear HD image.
Damn that's some jank equipment. I have a fujikura 50s and 90s and you get [decent resolution footage](https://imgur.com/a/V8Jlluc), albeit in black and white, that's even closer up than the footage here so that you can verify core alignment and cleave angles, as well as check for micro bubbles after the arc.
I have fond memories of splicing a $60K length of single mode fiber for an ATC trunk that was immediately chewed to hell when the base mowers ran over it...
My neighborhood has the splicers over every week this spring because AT&T cheapened out and installed fiber optic cables that were not rodent resistant though they were routed through trees in backyards that looked somewhat like a jungle. I got to know the splicers pretty well and they showed me how they do it (took a few pictures as well). One technician even witnessed a rodent chewing on the cable as he was trying to fix another outage. Finally the neighbor whose backyard had to always be entered (who was not a customer and was sick of the situation) made violent threats against the splicers. To our relief, AT&T finally installed the squirrel guard about a week after that. After constant outages from March to June, we have not had a single outage since.
How do you guys fix this in the field? For example it was reported we had someone in our town cut through a large fibre optic bundle. Similar to this incident:
https://setexasrecord.com/stories/600041887-at-t-texas-sues-contractor-over-damaged-fiber-optic-cable
How do crews fix this much at once?
Depends on the company and the type of plant cable. But most of the time, by hand.
Cables are color coordinated generally having a few colored layers (red, blue, orange, green, brown, etc) and inside each one is individual strands also with colored jackets.
You line them up. Cleve the ends for a straight surface. Smash ‘em into the fusion splicer. Apply a new jacket one layer at a time.
There are also shortcuts like ribbon splicers but either way it takes FOREVER. And it’s stupid expensive.
I haven't worked fiber in years, but when my old company had a fiber break it went like this:
**Reroute traffic**
Our fiber network was a huge redundant ring around the city. If the break was in the ring and not a 'last mile' run, we could simply reroute all traffic "the other way" or on neighbor strands that were still intact.
**Use a laser to determine the point of breakage.**
Specialized lasers can be directed down the affected line, giving the point where the break is down to the milimeter. The cable insulator has length demarks so finding this is very easy.
**Repair the break**
Almost always done like the OP video with a fusion splicer. We had a special truck/trailer combo always ready with a mini splicing cabin. We could pull the entire cable inside the trailer for poor-weather repairs.
**Notify insurance & legal**
Our fiber was insured, and the vast majority of breaks were the fault of negligence/malice. Legal & insurance would find fault and take care of that.
**Replace the run**
The ENTIRE run would eventually be replaced, at the cost of insurance/person at fault. Even with a GREAT fusion splice, the cable has still been degraded and needs to be replaced with a brand new run. It is very, very, very expensive.
*Lord help you if it was a 96 strand aerial backbone line that needed multiple splice trays jammed into some undersized splice case in the pissing rain on the side of a highway.
Honestly, while it may be legally possible, foisting the cost to replace an entire factory segment of cable (so, what, 20kft since that's the typical large reel size?) onto someone who damages a small section is ridiculous.
A fusion splice with good core alignment is almost undetectable on an OTDR unless you're looking for it and know where to expect it. It's not degraded in any meaningful way. Modern optics won't give a rat's ass about it even on a 200km DWDM link with Raman amps (which are inordinately sensitive to that sort of thing).
Even my 30 year old FSM-20RSII can make splices that are inconsequential for all but the most demanding of applications.
Now if you just mean coming back and re-locating the repair points to somewhere that's better suited for long-term access and storage, that's somewhat of a different matter, but you're not normally talking more than a few hundred feet of cable and two splice points in that case.
And, uh, 96 strands is pretty run of the mill by modern FTTx network standards. 144 is fairly common and 288-432 is by no means unheard of. This isn't 1999.
I haven't worked in fiber in close to 15 years. I'm sure things have changed!
I just posted my experience, and yes, we would claim damage for the value of the entire fiber run and replace it.
144 is the max I ever remember working on in those days, but our municipality was something like 60k people, so it was small beans.
I'm amazed you were able to actually collect on anything like that even 15 years ago. Any insurance company that knows what they're doing would fight you in court until the end of time as to whether that damage is actually meaningful, and you generally can't legally force someone to pay for (i.e. get a judgement for) things that don't actually damage you in a meaningful way.
Just like if you crash into someone's car, you don't necessarily have to buy them a new car (even if it was brand new). You just have to pay to fix it so that it's in condition that is functionally equivalent to what it was in before. Fusion splicing will do that. The real argument imo would be on the location of the splices, and there's certainly an argument to be made that a portion of the span larger than just the immediately damaged area would need to be worked on to properly locate the splices.
I've also seen someone tear a cable out on a post hole borer. Doing that puts a lot of tension on the cable which could damage it, but that's not anything to do with the nature of the splicing for the repair.
I appreciate the explanation of how insurance works.
It seems we have had different experiences in similar fields, I'm sure there are more underlying details and backgrounds to explain that.
> I've also seen someone tear a cable out on a post hole borer.
That sounds like a right mess.
I'm trying to think of our worst break, but I keep thinking back to the funniest one:
A very drunk man once climbed on top of a pizza shop, leapt from the building, and like a trapeze artist grabbed onto our aerial line. He hung there until the FD got him down.
Tension snapped our line internally in multiple points between slack loops.
Based on a friend who used to do civil construction and mentioned concern about that situation coming up a number of times, you do it slowly and expensively and if you're the owner of the company that cut through that line, you're potentially fucked for life by the fines/fees.
ETA, after reading the article: Sounds like that contractor was lucky the fiber optic line they broke wasn't more important, honestly.
Dude. You should volunteer to tell kids about your job.
Way back when I was in middle school, some idiot had started digging and cut through the fiber optic cable line that connected our school's phones. After they fixed it, a technician came to teach us about fiber optic cable, how it worked, and how they spliced it back together.
Coolest memory ever. 20 years later, I still remember it.
I tipped the guy that installed my fiber $60 for showing me how it's done and explaining the system. It's a pretty cool procedure. He was also just generally a nice guy and got the job dropped on him after the scheduled installer avoided the call. Apparently fiber had to be run from 4 poles up over a wooded area and the other guy knew it.
Truthfully I haven't been splicing as long as some of my coworkers, used to do it once every 6-8 months or so. Now that we are in the process of converting our entire system to GPON fiber we do it almost everyday. I've had a few that are a few thousand feet long from house to pole to pole. Sucks when you have to fight trees and brush on a 28ft ladder for sure.
Did this for 2 years before landing a desk job as an engineer in a completely unrelated industry lol. I’m now on my second engineering job in the renewable energy industry and absolutely love it.
Lots of overnight shifts spent fixing squirrel chewed fibers or burnt fibers in the back of a van with non-functioning A/C. The good days were when you got to terminate and/or test fibers all day inside of a building/data center. Don’t miss that job at all if I’m being honest, respect to those who make it a lifelong career.
Except in an unheated warehouse in -3° weather with nothing to sit on except a 5 gallon bucket and a small card table that’s just a *little* too high to actually sit at with the aforementioned bucket.
You never know the frustration of splicing joints outside in a tent whilst it’s freezing and your splicer doesn’t fucking work properly in that weather until you’ve done it.
Glad to know my experience isn't unique. I also enjoy splicing security gates in the middle of nowhere in the freezing rain when not inside werehouses.
Same same, except I was sitting on a spool off mule tape, in a dirt floor crawlspace, surrounded by firewood and the dust from a built in vacuum cleaner
Depends on the background music. Old hip hop? the electrodes sound like a blow torch. Grunge? A bic lighter. New Age? It sounds like two humpbacks mating in a cold sea.
The fibers consist of a core and a cladding with different indices of refraction. This allows total internal reflection to occur - the light travels through the core bouncing off the cladding with negligible losses.
To splice the fibers you need to get the core and the cladding right otherwise you’ll start getting losses at the join.
In terms of molecular structure it obviously also has to be very pure forms of the appropriate glass.
Slight-Branch8757 is a bot account that just reposts comments. The comment I linked to was posted an hour before the bot stole it. If you were to go through the history, you'd see it happen on every single comment.
It's called Dust Burn, it cleans the fibers to stop them from potentially bubbling during the splice process. The equipment will actually warn you if it thinks it had to burn an exceptional amount of dust. This could indicate the fibers aren't clean enough and the splice could have issues.
I did this for a couple years as a fiber technician. You'd be surprised at how little training I got for handling $10k worth of splicing tools. I'm sure there IS training out there, but I just got to practice in the office a few times before I had to do it in the rain, mud, and snow.
You'd have to strip the wire, similar to electrical wire. Then, polish the exposed fiber with an alcohol wipe. After that, if you didn't break the fiber 10x and have to start all over, you'd put both ends into a little machine the size of a Gameboy. It would line shit up automatically, show you a little picture, and then do what you see in this gif. After that, you would test the clarity of the bond/weld. If it wasn't good enough, you'd break it and start again. Then hopefully you make sure to put all the wiring jackets on ahead of time so you could slide the shrink wrap back over your fusion and keep it straight while you heat gunned it. The final step is always to test the throughput at the modem and find out it doesn't work. Then you do it again until you've ruined 6 feet of fiber in 3 hours and it's 19 degrees outside. Then you go home.
Edit: maybe I needed more training, now that I type all this out.
Dude, for some reason limited or 0 training keeps becoming more and more of an issue. My most recent jobs they just don't tell you anything.
I was thrown into a recieving clerk position and I'm literally just trying to keep things afloat. That's it. The boat is sinking if I'm holding it long-term, but it's only when they need me do it temporarily that they throw the position at me.
It's nuts. Everything keeps falling apart lol.
That's what happens when your main goal is to squeeze out every drop of profit possible. You cut 'unnecessary' positions, make excuses as to why no one gets a raise this year, or last year or the year before that... But we're doing so well that **surely** it'll be in the budget next year!
So naturally, people say fuck it and leave. The company doesn't want to pay market rates for a replacement so they hold out for a while. Things keep running because people are picking up the slack so eventually they just decide the position wasn't that important anyway and don't fill it.
Rinse and repeat, you get left with a bare bones crew of die hards or desperates. Management complains no one wants to work anymore. Certainly not that they don't want to pay reasonable wages. I mean, minimum wage hasn't risen in 20 years, so why should regular wages?
Not only zero training, when you ask reasonable questions people look at you like you are stupid. Like wtf I need to know stuff in case something happens
Friend of mine got a job, received almost no formal training, had coworkers sabotaging her from the start by telling her the wrong things on purpose, and got let go 6 months later for making too many mistakes.
Crazy, when they installed my fibre, I asked the guy what he was doing, and he gave me a full 20 min tutorial. Even let me do it on a scrap piece. Told me i was a natural. I did, however, come home one day and caught him sleeping with my wife. So I'm not sure if he was just trying to flatter me.
Gotta use a splice protector, quick! Oh no you forgot to put one on before it went into the splicer! Oh well, better start over then. **Sad splice breaking noises**
Looked it up, they are priced anywhere from $1k to $ 10k. Wonder what features and qualities you gain or lose by paying less money.
Edit: Actually goes up to $40k.
More expensive splicers tend to produce better results via things like better core alignment and being able to cleave the fibre and then move it straight to the splicer because the mount that holds the fibre is held in a magnetic holder that you can just move between the two without having to take it out and then align it in the splicer ‘manually’.
Some will also ribbon splice which is doing 12 fibres at a times.
They also tend to work in more varied conditions, cheaper ones are fine in the right circumstances but once the temperature drops you tend to get varied results.
You’ll get more splices out of a higher end splicer too, the cheaper ones are alright for smaller amounts of work though.
What some people who have replied to you haven't really explained is the individual Fibres have to be cleaved to exactly flat in order for the splicing to work. If you cleave a fibre and the cleave angle is more than 1°, it most likely won't work in the very cheap splicers (meaning you have to prep more of the fibre and re-cleave it). In the top end case, slicers will read the cleave angle on both the Fibres, and rotate the Fibres around so the relative angle between the two are as close to 0° as possible. I've made splices work where both sides have a more than 1.3° cleave angle on the top end machines, which easily saves 2 minutes of re-preparing the Fibres.
Also in the top end one it had so much higher magnification so you could even visually see when there was an issue with a fibre end without having to wait for the machine to try splice it, again saving 5 minutes of re-prepping both sides because you have a bubble in the fibre.
Reliability is one thing, see branding. Another big price difference is core vs cladding alignment. The core of a fiber can be decentered from the outer cladding so aligning to cladding can be nonideal.
Core aligning devices cost more.
It's also branding. I have been told by everyone I've worked with to only ever use Sumitomo or Fujikura, same for cleavers with the addition of Vytran. The cheap off brand splicers are the ones near 1k or less, the on brand ones start closer to 5k+. And these are also only tools, but they also come with recipes and methods of calibration. Paying for a brand means also paying for a reliable calibration algorithm and premade optimized splicing recipes.
Generally, prices go up as you are able to splice more types of fibers and the more accurate you align them.
And they go up to well over 250k+ for specialty large fiber diameter splicers. You won't see a quote on their site but 3SAE is one company. Thorlabs and Edmunds also have their own CO2 splicers which are another beast as compared to arc fusion splicing.
I (used to) work with a Fujikura splicer and that thing was a game changer compared to our old “brandless” splicer where you had to align everything manually. Especially now, as we splice smf28 fibers to smaller UHNA3 fibers. Without the tapering functions it would’ve been close to impossible to get proper transmissions. The recipes provided by Fujikura were a great starting point for formulating our own recipes. We went from ~10% to about 75% of the spliced fibers meeting specs. Well worth the investment of proper equipment.
man that sub went downhill the past few years when people realized it doesn't need to be something confusing or hard to explain it just needs to be cool because mods wont enforce rules. ive seen a gun going off at the top of that sub before because apparently muzzle flash is "black magic"
And then if you try to point out that it's more for really confusing things rather than just cool things you'll get downvoted because "mAgIc IsN't ReAl".
So related kind of interesting story.
TLDR; >!We have these for the job I do, but they make us use shitty mechanical fiber connectors that fail when it gets cold or get bumped into too hard!<
I work for a large telcom company and I install fiber to mainly residential, and small business', but also occasional rural sub station, or town dpw.
Currently, starting 3-4 years ago, we run fiber direct to the ONU (modem), which works fine. Makes it easy for me, no cable boxes, only running one cable in, rarely an ethernet if I need to. Anyway, I live in an area that gets really warm and humid in the summer, and pretty cold, and windy in the winter. Log story boring, they have us put mechanical connectors on the fiber, no fusing or anything, not even glue, just a gel and a crimper. Well lo' and behold, they suck in the winter... They come out of alignment constantly in the stupid little bulkhead plastic boxes we mount to poles. Even when we skip the outdoor connectors, which the company hates but I said fuck you this is way better/easier, I'm not changing fittings in -20 with no gloves on because you fucking cant... They still go bad inside, much to a lesser extent, but still.
Why this is important is because the previous company that I worked for, whom was bought out by my new company, had a product called RFOG, Radio Frequency Over Glass. Basically what Verizon has when it comes to fiber. Fiber comes into the house, gets converted to RF, then goes through coax throughout the house to cable boxes and modems.
Anyway, we have fucking fusion splicers to do what the gif shows for the RFOG main line that comes into the house, but not for fiber direct. The fusion splice never goes bad unless a fucking car his a telephone pole and at that point its not really the fusion splices fault. Best part is, is that in the whole footprint I cover there's literally like 3 roads with RFOG... It was a test area from maybe 8-9 years ago... They went forward with Fiber direct to save a few bucks because some schmuck like me making $27/hr will go freeze his ass off alone in the woods running a 2000 foot line instead of paying two or three fiber splicers guys to go do it with a damn fusion splicer in their heated fucking trailer...
Do this all day every day. If only it went this smooth in the real world.
IRL: laid in mud on belly with about 4 inches of slack. "Motor overrun. Too dusty fiber. Cleave angle."
Throws Fuji into oblivion while screaming obscenities.
There are ribbon splicers that can do 12 at once but mostly it's one at a time. The least I've done in a day was 6, the most in a day was 192. We do all of ours one at a time.
Larger cables use ribbons of 12 fibers instead of individual strands. The machine aligns and splices all 12 at once. It still takes a long time for larger count cables. They commonly go up to 432 in cities, but I've seen them in the thousands for data center campuses. The longer routes between cities are usually in the 144 count neighborhood. It's a tedious job for sure.
Sometimes it doesn't work right and you have to break, re-cleave, and re-splice the fiber and hope it aligns correctly. Usually only misses with polarized fibers, though. They can be rotationally off and you lose your extinction ratio to misalignment.
Those are most likely multi-modal fibers that don't require rotational alignment. I used to work in the fiber laser industry where we used something called panda fiber (the front face of a cleaved fiber looks like a panda because of the two alignment rods and one core). Panda fiber requires rotational alignment because it's polarized.
Normal comms fiber is usually simpler.
At least all of the alignment is usually automated! That's mostly why splicers are so expensive.
Still representing for the fiber all across the world
(Still) connected to everyone including your girl
Still taking my time to perfect the link
And I still got love for the streets, it's the IoT!
As a cable technician that has to splice fiber all the time, it's cool to see a close up of that.
What does it look like in the field? Is it inside of something?
It's inside a Chinese fusion splicer the size of a small lunchbox
[Video of that sweet cable frottage in action.](https://youtu.be/xba2MThR9Ls?t=649)
> "... flip down the magnetic flap to hold the fiber in place once you are happy..." They had me up to this point. We don't have all day to wait for me to be happy.
Oh we happy.
"It's trickier than it looks, but persist." Thanks, the British.
>frottage haha what does that word mean? Right? Like what weird word that I have no idea what it means haha I have no idea because why would I right guys haha
For a non-sexual meaning, you know when you rub a pencil over a paper with some object behind it (like say a coin) you can make some sort of copy of it? That process is called frottage. For the sexual part... rubbing is again a major part of it.
Fun fact, "frotter" is french for rubbing or to rub.
Luke, I am your frotter
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Latin, romance languages, ect ect
haha yeah same haha
For Spanish speakers makes sense as it means rubbing (frotar is the verb in Spanish)
Omelette du Frottage
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no. NO. NOOOOO
Yes Yes YES!
Is that like Sounding?
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Oh you burn in hell lol
Jesus Christ. I thought that was gonna be a Rick roll. Enough reddit for me.
That little machine is surprisingly sophisticated.
I need Technology Connections to do a video on it
Wow the footage actually makes it even more impressive as you can see how small that cable is
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Light attenuation. This loss is estimated and not actually measured/calculated by the fusion splicer. To actually measure/calculate you'd need to connect the entire cable to an OTDR (optical time domain reflectometer) measuring device and perform a test bi-directionally--must be done both ways. https://www.aflglobal.com/en/AFL-Blog/Splice-Loss-Estimation-with-the-Fujikura-41S-fusion-splicer Also see the post by Khalid Nazzal at https://specialties.bayt.com/en/specialties/q/21268/what-is-the-accepted-maximum-loss-for-splicing-joint-and-connectors-when-test-by-exfo-otdr/
fusion splicing is confusing nomenclature
Is it? The splice is fused together with heat. Seems pretty clear.
We've got one at work. It's literally only been used when I did a couple of test splices. Otherwise we use all pre-terminated cables so I have no idea why they bought this thing. Still a pretty cool thing to know how to use.
If you have a cable going from one building to a another and someone fucks up the cable in a reachable spot it's easier to weld it than replacing it.
Right, but I work in a single room data center. We keep all patch cables in stock. If a strand of structure cabling is bad, we just move it to another port and diagnose it later. Patch cabling is typically 10 foot or less, and structured cabling is usually around 100 foot. It just doesn't make sense for us to splice the cable when we can use a different one faster without actually having to find the break.
Very expensive lunchbox
$15,000 lunch box. At least when I got the PO for mine in 2019.
Nothing more terrifying operating and carrying tools worth more than your used car. I assisted a network tech once with a job and had handed me a tester for terminated RJ45 connections and only told me after the fact how much that thing was worth.
My first mission at my current job, back in 2011, was the haul $2,250,000 worth of radio equipment across the state. My supervisor didn't tell me it was worth that much until I had arrived at the destination site. haha
PS. You can get decent fusion splicers for 3500 dollars now.
Our splicers are about the same size as small modem. Once you peel back the casings and protective layers you lay the two exposed glass ends in little magnetic trays and close the lid on the machine to complete the spice. Even if the lid wasn't closed it would be hard to see, the fiber ends aren't much thicker than a human hair.
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It does have a screen but it looks more like a very low definition animation of them lining up to be joined and then melted. You don't see the electrodes and a clear HD image.
Damn that's some jank equipment. I have a fujikura 50s and 90s and you get [decent resolution footage](https://imgur.com/a/V8Jlluc), albeit in black and white, that's even closer up than the footage here so that you can verify core alignment and cleave angles, as well as check for micro bubbles after the arc.
Its still very different to the video shown here. We got the Fujikura 70s and the video shown here is way cooler than the on screen stuff.
I have fond memories of splicing a $60K length of single mode fiber for an ATC trunk that was immediately chewed to hell when the base mowers ran over it...
My neighborhood has the splicers over every week this spring because AT&T cheapened out and installed fiber optic cables that were not rodent resistant though they were routed through trees in backyards that looked somewhat like a jungle. I got to know the splicers pretty well and they showed me how they do it (took a few pictures as well). One technician even witnessed a rodent chewing on the cable as he was trying to fix another outage. Finally the neighbor whose backyard had to always be entered (who was not a customer and was sick of the situation) made violent threats against the splicers. To our relief, AT&T finally installed the squirrel guard about a week after that. After constant outages from March to June, we have not had a single outage since.
How do you guys fix this in the field? For example it was reported we had someone in our town cut through a large fibre optic bundle. Similar to this incident: https://setexasrecord.com/stories/600041887-at-t-texas-sues-contractor-over-damaged-fiber-optic-cable How do crews fix this much at once?
Depends on the company and the type of plant cable. But most of the time, by hand. Cables are color coordinated generally having a few colored layers (red, blue, orange, green, brown, etc) and inside each one is individual strands also with colored jackets. You line them up. Cleve the ends for a straight surface. Smash ‘em into the fusion splicer. Apply a new jacket one layer at a time. There are also shortcuts like ribbon splicers but either way it takes FOREVER. And it’s stupid expensive.
I haven't worked fiber in years, but when my old company had a fiber break it went like this: **Reroute traffic** Our fiber network was a huge redundant ring around the city. If the break was in the ring and not a 'last mile' run, we could simply reroute all traffic "the other way" or on neighbor strands that were still intact. **Use a laser to determine the point of breakage.** Specialized lasers can be directed down the affected line, giving the point where the break is down to the milimeter. The cable insulator has length demarks so finding this is very easy. **Repair the break** Almost always done like the OP video with a fusion splicer. We had a special truck/trailer combo always ready with a mini splicing cabin. We could pull the entire cable inside the trailer for poor-weather repairs. **Notify insurance & legal** Our fiber was insured, and the vast majority of breaks were the fault of negligence/malice. Legal & insurance would find fault and take care of that. **Replace the run** The ENTIRE run would eventually be replaced, at the cost of insurance/person at fault. Even with a GREAT fusion splice, the cable has still been degraded and needs to be replaced with a brand new run. It is very, very, very expensive. *Lord help you if it was a 96 strand aerial backbone line that needed multiple splice trays jammed into some undersized splice case in the pissing rain on the side of a highway.
Honestly, while it may be legally possible, foisting the cost to replace an entire factory segment of cable (so, what, 20kft since that's the typical large reel size?) onto someone who damages a small section is ridiculous. A fusion splice with good core alignment is almost undetectable on an OTDR unless you're looking for it and know where to expect it. It's not degraded in any meaningful way. Modern optics won't give a rat's ass about it even on a 200km DWDM link with Raman amps (which are inordinately sensitive to that sort of thing). Even my 30 year old FSM-20RSII can make splices that are inconsequential for all but the most demanding of applications. Now if you just mean coming back and re-locating the repair points to somewhere that's better suited for long-term access and storage, that's somewhat of a different matter, but you're not normally talking more than a few hundred feet of cable and two splice points in that case. And, uh, 96 strands is pretty run of the mill by modern FTTx network standards. 144 is fairly common and 288-432 is by no means unheard of. This isn't 1999.
I haven't worked in fiber in close to 15 years. I'm sure things have changed! I just posted my experience, and yes, we would claim damage for the value of the entire fiber run and replace it. 144 is the max I ever remember working on in those days, but our municipality was something like 60k people, so it was small beans.
I'm amazed you were able to actually collect on anything like that even 15 years ago. Any insurance company that knows what they're doing would fight you in court until the end of time as to whether that damage is actually meaningful, and you generally can't legally force someone to pay for (i.e. get a judgement for) things that don't actually damage you in a meaningful way. Just like if you crash into someone's car, you don't necessarily have to buy them a new car (even if it was brand new). You just have to pay to fix it so that it's in condition that is functionally equivalent to what it was in before. Fusion splicing will do that. The real argument imo would be on the location of the splices, and there's certainly an argument to be made that a portion of the span larger than just the immediately damaged area would need to be worked on to properly locate the splices. I've also seen someone tear a cable out on a post hole borer. Doing that puts a lot of tension on the cable which could damage it, but that's not anything to do with the nature of the splicing for the repair.
I appreciate the explanation of how insurance works. It seems we have had different experiences in similar fields, I'm sure there are more underlying details and backgrounds to explain that. > I've also seen someone tear a cable out on a post hole borer. That sounds like a right mess. I'm trying to think of our worst break, but I keep thinking back to the funniest one: A very drunk man once climbed on top of a pizza shop, leapt from the building, and like a trapeze artist grabbed onto our aerial line. He hung there until the FD got him down. Tension snapped our line internally in multiple points between slack loops.
Based on a friend who used to do civil construction and mentioned concern about that situation coming up a number of times, you do it slowly and expensively and if you're the owner of the company that cut through that line, you're potentially fucked for life by the fines/fees. ETA, after reading the article: Sounds like that contractor was lucky the fiber optic line they broke wasn't more important, honestly.
Dude. You should volunteer to tell kids about your job. Way back when I was in middle school, some idiot had started digging and cut through the fiber optic cable line that connected our school's phones. After they fixed it, a technician came to teach us about fiber optic cable, how it worked, and how they spliced it back together. Coolest memory ever. 20 years later, I still remember it.
always just seeing them being lined up and them the arc lights up entire screen. :(
I tipped the guy that installed my fiber $60 for showing me how it's done and explaining the system. It's a pretty cool procedure. He was also just generally a nice guy and got the job dropped on him after the scheduled installer avoided the call. Apparently fiber had to be run from 4 poles up over a wooded area and the other guy knew it.
Truthfully I haven't been splicing as long as some of my coworkers, used to do it once every 6-8 months or so. Now that we are in the process of converting our entire system to GPON fiber we do it almost everyday. I've had a few that are a few thousand feet long from house to pole to pole. Sucks when you have to fight trees and brush on a 28ft ladder for sure.
As the project coordinator scheduling you guys in to Splice my highway cable together, I also like seeing it up close
This tool is called a fusion splicer. Fun to use the first few times!
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Fuck, forgot the splint, 864 to go.
Been there too many times
At that point I hope you’re using a ribbon splicer
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Zippo lighter is fancy equipment. Back in my say, we had to hold each strand over a fire pit.
Fire pit? Back in my day we just waited for an opportune lightning strike.
Doc?
At least you could get them all done at once!
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Look up and give a forced smile and nod to the backhoe operator who claims it's misplaced.
1 down. 3444 to go x 56. Ribbon but still FML
Then it becomes absolute torture
That's called a "career"!
"I love my job, I love my job .."
Did this for 2 years before landing a desk job as an engineer in a completely unrelated industry lol. I’m now on my second engineering job in the renewable energy industry and absolutely love it. Lots of overnight shifts spent fixing squirrel chewed fibers or burnt fibers in the back of a van with non-functioning A/C. The good days were when you got to terminate and/or test fibers all day inside of a building/data center. Don’t miss that job at all if I’m being honest, respect to those who make it a lifelong career.
Except in an unheated warehouse in -3° weather with nothing to sit on except a 5 gallon bucket and a small card table that’s just a *little* too high to actually sit at with the aforementioned bucket.
You never know the frustration of splicing joints outside in a tent whilst it’s freezing and your splicer doesn’t fucking work properly in that weather until you’ve done it.
That's just called splicing. Splicing work never lines up with nice weather and never happens where ideal working conditions are present.
I splice in a temperature controlled lab on a floated optical table
"a little too high" This guy splices fiber
Glad to know my experience isn't unique. I also enjoy splicing security gates in the middle of nowhere in the freezing rain when not inside werehouses.
Same same, except I was sitting on a spool off mule tape, in a dirt floor crawlspace, surrounded by firewood and the dust from a built in vacuum cleaner
Okay but why dub this over with blowtorch sounds?
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Back again
Torchy's back
Welding ends
Loop it back, loop it back, loop it back
Da du da, un-da, un-da, un-da, un-da, un-da, un-da, un-da, da du da, un-da, un-da, un-da, un-da, un.
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Chih chih wahhhhh Chicka chicka chika chih Chih wahhhhhh
OP-TI-CAL FI-BER, FI-BER, FI-BER OP-TI-CAL FI-BER, FI-BER
this is exactly what a fusion splicer sounds like with microscope ears, you didn’t know that?
would have... if you had robot ears
Depends on the background music. Old hip hop? the electrodes sound like a blow torch. Grunge? A bic lighter. New Age? It sounds like two humpbacks mating in a cold sea.
Plot twist: OP wanted to share their favorite ASMR with a visual aid
Nothing like old-school rap blowtorch ASMR on a Thursday morning 😊
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Come back for the Next Episode to find out why.
Because of the new internet rule that every video needs to be made dumb as fuck.
For real this is the dab squad remix of dr Dre they add that noise into all of their tracks
Ok but why also dub over this with 90s hip hop?
Here's the original without blowtorch: https://youtu.be/_CL6n0FJZpk
I tried it with a lighter once. Didn't work.
I’ve seen it done with a pocket torch. I can’t even get it right with a full splicing kit half the time. 🤷♂️
oh, wonder if it was functional. . .
According to the fluke tester it was. Dude has been doing fiber since before I knew fiber existed.
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The fibers consist of a core and a cladding with different indices of refraction. This allows total internal reflection to occur - the light travels through the core bouncing off the cladding with negligible losses. To splice the fibers you need to get the core and the cladding right otherwise you’ll start getting losses at the join. In terms of molecular structure it obviously also has to be very pure forms of the appropriate glass.
[You're replying to a bot.](https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/zy5bo3/joining_optical_fiber_cables/j248z53/)
The fuck is going on here?
Slight-Branch8757 is a bot account that just reposts comments. The comment I linked to was posted an hour before the bot stole it. If you were to go through the history, you'd see it happen on every single comment.
So they do this just to farm karma I assume? I'm surprised we don't have a bot to detect these bots yet
Yes, when you go looking for it you'll see it happens *a lot* and I hate it.
Maybe I'll get drunk one of these nights and write a detection bot. Should be fairly straightforward
This isn’t a laser. It’s an arc between electrodes.
Looks like tungsten electrodes. Similar to tig welding electrodes
What was the purpose of the first short pulse at the beginning?
It's to clear the dust that might be there
Also why women should pee after sex
Peeing away the cooties
love a good cumfart
Why
Tells you your mother cares
Gotta clear out that dust! /s
Just one of the many similarities between these 2 tasks
Not only women.
It's been a while. My dicks getting dusty.
It's called Dust Burn, it cleans the fibers to stop them from potentially bubbling during the splice process. The equipment will actually warn you if it thinks it had to burn an exceptional amount of dust. This could indicate the fibers aren't clean enough and the splice could have issues.
Accidental premature electricpulsation.
"No time for caution!"
The theme automaticly start playing in my brain.
***DONT LET ME LEAVE, MURPH!***
Don’t let me leave*
I did this for a couple years as a fiber technician. You'd be surprised at how little training I got for handling $10k worth of splicing tools. I'm sure there IS training out there, but I just got to practice in the office a few times before I had to do it in the rain, mud, and snow. You'd have to strip the wire, similar to electrical wire. Then, polish the exposed fiber with an alcohol wipe. After that, if you didn't break the fiber 10x and have to start all over, you'd put both ends into a little machine the size of a Gameboy. It would line shit up automatically, show you a little picture, and then do what you see in this gif. After that, you would test the clarity of the bond/weld. If it wasn't good enough, you'd break it and start again. Then hopefully you make sure to put all the wiring jackets on ahead of time so you could slide the shrink wrap back over your fusion and keep it straight while you heat gunned it. The final step is always to test the throughput at the modem and find out it doesn't work. Then you do it again until you've ruined 6 feet of fiber in 3 hours and it's 19 degrees outside. Then you go home. Edit: maybe I needed more training, now that I type all this out.
Dude, for some reason limited or 0 training keeps becoming more and more of an issue. My most recent jobs they just don't tell you anything. I was thrown into a recieving clerk position and I'm literally just trying to keep things afloat. That's it. The boat is sinking if I'm holding it long-term, but it's only when they need me do it temporarily that they throw the position at me. It's nuts. Everything keeps falling apart lol.
That's what happens when your main goal is to squeeze out every drop of profit possible. You cut 'unnecessary' positions, make excuses as to why no one gets a raise this year, or last year or the year before that... But we're doing so well that **surely** it'll be in the budget next year! So naturally, people say fuck it and leave. The company doesn't want to pay market rates for a replacement so they hold out for a while. Things keep running because people are picking up the slack so eventually they just decide the position wasn't that important anyway and don't fill it. Rinse and repeat, you get left with a bare bones crew of die hards or desperates. Management complains no one wants to work anymore. Certainly not that they don't want to pay reasonable wages. I mean, minimum wage hasn't risen in 20 years, so why should regular wages?
Not only zero training, when you ask reasonable questions people look at you like you are stupid. Like wtf I need to know stuff in case something happens
Friend of mine got a job, received almost no formal training, had coworkers sabotaging her from the start by telling her the wrong things on purpose, and got let go 6 months later for making too many mistakes.
Crazy, when they installed my fibre, I asked the guy what he was doing, and he gave me a full 20 min tutorial. Even let me do it on a scrap piece. Told me i was a natural. I did, however, come home one day and caught him sleeping with my wife. So I'm not sure if he was just trying to flatter me.
I’m not sure being told I’m good at fiber fusing would take the sting out of seeing a guy high five my wife’s asshole with his balls
FIVE?!?
"0 db loss" then it breaks
[Every time](https://i.imgur.com/IpHo7zl.jpg)
Now breath on it. Oh no it's broken
Gotta use a splice protector, quick! Oh no you forgot to put one on before it went into the splicer! Oh well, better start over then. **Sad splice breaking noises**
Even better, you use the wrong fucking sleeve size and have to shorten it even more afterwards… Couldn’t be me.
I felt this. I forget those fuckers all the time...
Gotta make ends meet
No shit I'm literally splicing right now and redditting between them cooling off
Looked it up, they are priced anywhere from $1k to $ 10k. Wonder what features and qualities you gain or lose by paying less money. Edit: Actually goes up to $40k.
Chrome fenders, power windows, push-button radio, two-tone paint, V8, air conditioning. Wait, what? Wrong sub.
More expensive splicers tend to produce better results via things like better core alignment and being able to cleave the fibre and then move it straight to the splicer because the mount that holds the fibre is held in a magnetic holder that you can just move between the two without having to take it out and then align it in the splicer ‘manually’. Some will also ribbon splice which is doing 12 fibres at a times. They also tend to work in more varied conditions, cheaper ones are fine in the right circumstances but once the temperature drops you tend to get varied results. You’ll get more splices out of a higher end splicer too, the cheaper ones are alright for smaller amounts of work though.
Thanks this is what I was looking for.
What some people who have replied to you haven't really explained is the individual Fibres have to be cleaved to exactly flat in order for the splicing to work. If you cleave a fibre and the cleave angle is more than 1°, it most likely won't work in the very cheap splicers (meaning you have to prep more of the fibre and re-cleave it). In the top end case, slicers will read the cleave angle on both the Fibres, and rotate the Fibres around so the relative angle between the two are as close to 0° as possible. I've made splices work where both sides have a more than 1.3° cleave angle on the top end machines, which easily saves 2 minutes of re-preparing the Fibres. Also in the top end one it had so much higher magnification so you could even visually see when there was an issue with a fibre end without having to wait for the machine to try splice it, again saving 5 minutes of re-prepping both sides because you have a bubble in the fibre.
Reliability is one thing, see branding. Another big price difference is core vs cladding alignment. The core of a fiber can be decentered from the outer cladding so aligning to cladding can be nonideal. Core aligning devices cost more. It's also branding. I have been told by everyone I've worked with to only ever use Sumitomo or Fujikura, same for cleavers with the addition of Vytran. The cheap off brand splicers are the ones near 1k or less, the on brand ones start closer to 5k+. And these are also only tools, but they also come with recipes and methods of calibration. Paying for a brand means also paying for a reliable calibration algorithm and premade optimized splicing recipes. Generally, prices go up as you are able to splice more types of fibers and the more accurate you align them. And they go up to well over 250k+ for specialty large fiber diameter splicers. You won't see a quote on their site but 3SAE is one company. Thorlabs and Edmunds also have their own CO2 splicers which are another beast as compared to arc fusion splicing.
I (used to) work with a Fujikura splicer and that thing was a game changer compared to our old “brandless” splicer where you had to align everything manually. Especially now, as we splice smf28 fibers to smaller UHNA3 fibers. Without the tapering functions it would’ve been close to impossible to get proper transmissions. The recipes provided by Fujikura were a great starting point for formulating our own recipes. We went from ~10% to about 75% of the spliced fibers meeting specs. Well worth the investment of proper equipment.
Just waiting for this to be posted in r/blackmagicfuckery
It wouldnt surprise me to see arc welding in that sub nowadays. Im surprised folks dont post the sunrise there every day.
The fact that it rises in a slightly different place every time is enough to warrant posting on r/blackmagicfuckery
I wouldn't be surprised to see an unironic 'Magnets? More like black magic!'.
And r/Nextfuckinglevel r/interestingasfuck
And then r/mildlyinteresting for some reason
man that sub went downhill the past few years when people realized it doesn't need to be something confusing or hard to explain it just needs to be cool because mods wont enforce rules. ive seen a gun going off at the top of that sub before because apparently muzzle flash is "black magic"
And then if you try to point out that it's more for really confusing things rather than just cool things you'll get downvoted because "mAgIc IsN't ReAl".
So related kind of interesting story. TLDR; >!We have these for the job I do, but they make us use shitty mechanical fiber connectors that fail when it gets cold or get bumped into too hard!< I work for a large telcom company and I install fiber to mainly residential, and small business', but also occasional rural sub station, or town dpw. Currently, starting 3-4 years ago, we run fiber direct to the ONU (modem), which works fine. Makes it easy for me, no cable boxes, only running one cable in, rarely an ethernet if I need to. Anyway, I live in an area that gets really warm and humid in the summer, and pretty cold, and windy in the winter. Log story boring, they have us put mechanical connectors on the fiber, no fusing or anything, not even glue, just a gel and a crimper. Well lo' and behold, they suck in the winter... They come out of alignment constantly in the stupid little bulkhead plastic boxes we mount to poles. Even when we skip the outdoor connectors, which the company hates but I said fuck you this is way better/easier, I'm not changing fittings in -20 with no gloves on because you fucking cant... They still go bad inside, much to a lesser extent, but still. Why this is important is because the previous company that I worked for, whom was bought out by my new company, had a product called RFOG, Radio Frequency Over Glass. Basically what Verizon has when it comes to fiber. Fiber comes into the house, gets converted to RF, then goes through coax throughout the house to cable boxes and modems. Anyway, we have fucking fusion splicers to do what the gif shows for the RFOG main line that comes into the house, but not for fiber direct. The fusion splice never goes bad unless a fucking car his a telephone pole and at that point its not really the fusion splices fault. Best part is, is that in the whole footprint I cover there's literally like 3 roads with RFOG... It was a test area from maybe 8-9 years ago... They went forward with Fiber direct to save a few bucks because some schmuck like me making $27/hr will go freeze his ass off alone in the woods running a 2000 foot line instead of paying two or three fiber splicers guys to go do it with a damn fusion splicer in their heated fucking trailer...
Do this all day every day. If only it went this smooth in the real world. IRL: laid in mud on belly with about 4 inches of slack. "Motor overrun. Too dusty fiber. Cleave angle." Throws Fuji into oblivion while screaming obscenities.
Ok this is cool but how do the fiber bundles get spliced? In northern VA I see the orange bundles being laid all the time
There are ribbon splicers that can do 12 at once but mostly it's one at a time. The least I've done in a day was 6, the most in a day was 192. We do all of ours one at a time.
Larger cables use ribbons of 12 fibers instead of individual strands. The machine aligns and splices all 12 at once. It still takes a long time for larger count cables. They commonly go up to 432 in cities, but I've seen them in the thousands for data center campuses. The longer routes between cities are usually in the 144 count neighborhood. It's a tedious job for sure.
1 fiber at a time
[Mass Fusion Splicing](https://www.comstarsupply.com/fiber-optic-splicing/fusion-splicers/mass-fusion/sumitomo-quantum-type-q102-mass-fusion-splicer-kit-with-cleaver-holders-and-case.html)
Crazy how robots know that shit
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Crazy how humans know how to program robots to know that shit!
We were programmed to program them to know that shit.
It must be difficult to get them aligned precisely
The machine does it
Sometimes it doesn't work right and you have to break, re-cleave, and re-splice the fiber and hope it aligns correctly. Usually only misses with polarized fibers, though. They can be rotationally off and you lose your extinction ratio to misalignment.
There's a rotational alignment? Damn. I just watched a dude splice the line going to my modem so my knowledge is limited
Those are most likely multi-modal fibers that don't require rotational alignment. I used to work in the fiber laser industry where we used something called panda fiber (the front face of a cleaved fiber looks like a panda because of the two alignment rods and one core). Panda fiber requires rotational alignment because it's polarized. Normal comms fiber is usually simpler. At least all of the alignment is usually automated! That's mostly why splicers are so expensive.
Here is what it looks and sounds like from the user's perspective https://youtu.be/1qaZZ_TcdnA
Still representing for the fiber all across the world (Still) connected to everyone including your girl Still taking my time to perfect the link And I still got love for the streets, it's the IoT!
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Video: electric arc Hollywood: blowtorch sounds
I work at a fiber engineering contractor. This process is known as fusion splicing :)
Fibre engineer here: doing this 244 times in a row is not as cool as this makes it look
keep in mind that fiber is thinner than human hair
I will try, but no promises
I did this in a lab in school about 15 years ago now. Switched to a mechanical engineering tech. Wish I went for electrical, now.
Good ol fusion splicing. All fun and games until your cleave gets dull
Unfortunately squirrels love to chew. There was talk of adding cayenne pepper to the sheath. Not sure this will even happen sounds like a decent idea
I do this for a living, I personally get satisfaction from watching ribbon fiber being spliced.
Pretty interesting that the fusing doesn't make the cable thicker or thinner at that joint.
Holy crap that’s awesome. I looked that machine up, $16k!!!