Description

With the prohibitive cost of installing new fiber, service providers often prefer to use installed fiber rather than build new infrastructures. Sometimes, older fibers might have been deemed unusable because of poor performance, in particular due to PMD. In other cases, a lower data rate might have been chosen (e.g., 2.5G) because a fiber with high PMD was considered unsuitable for fast data rates (e.g., 10G). That was before distributed PMD analysis. This innovative PMD measurement method enables service providers to leverage the installed fiber infrastructure to its full potential.

Since traditional PMD measurement techniques only provide a total end‑to‑end value compared against pass/fail thresholds, it used to be impossible to determine what caused a link to “fail” its PMD test, i.e., the whole link, or only localized sections. The distributed PMD analysis approach was developed to avoid such grey areas, and to help network operators tackle the PMD assessment challenge.

Features:

• Locates fiber sections that are large contributors to the total PMD of a link
• Makes it possible to isolate and repair only the worst PMD sections of the fiber cable
• Allows the cost-effective upgrade of a fiber network otherwise limited in speed by PMD
• Helps identify small changes that can boost the entire network’s performance