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Fiber Cabling SUCKS!!!!

ToohipGottaGo

ToohipGottaGo

Man That's Some Hair
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The gov't likes to use fiber cabling for certain networks for obvious reasons. Well I'm the IT Project Planner and Infrastructure guy for certain parts of the Air Force Research Lab and we use a ton of this crap. I've always used copper (CAT 5 or 6) for most stuff. The nice thing about fiber is you can get a lot of drops and cables in a small area, the bad part is terminating the stuff. We started a huge project and terminating fiber absolutely sucks. Just venting guys. Anyone else have any experience with this stuff? :banghead: I'm glad I have tee times this weekend.
 
I used to sell Metro E and fiber based internet solutions. The installs were always a pita.


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We use fiber in the majority of our projects going from Distribution Switches to Access Switches and insist that a Panduit Certified Installer do all the terminations. There is nothing worse than when I go to a job site and the connector pulls off or we lose the signal due to poor terminations.
 
Punching down CAT5's at a patch panel all day is no picnic either. The freaking tool to terminate Fiber optic is insanely expensive too.
 
We do a ton of this, as our core product (Passive Optical LAN) is fiber based. There are many ways to do it, and our technique varies from project to project. I think most techs would rather fusion splice than put connectors on.
 
I'm not a fan of doing termination on any cable. One of my least favorite things to do is a cat 5/6 patch panel. First few are always fine easy and quick but just so repetitive .
Fiber termination is something I try to avoid if possible. I always have jumpers with me and hopefully that's enough haha.
 
I used to be in charge of network installations for the State of TN and we did a lot of fiber. Fortunately I didn't pull it or terminate it myself, I just directed our cabling contractor.

Fiber definitely takes a long time to terminate. But given the amount of bandwidth you can get through it, it's generally worth the effort.

One thing I learned long ago though - make sure you pull as high-capacity cable as you can and as much of it as you can. You only want to pull it once.
 
We're using good stuff, always do. We terminate instead of splice because for us it's easier. Terminating is tedious and very time consuming but we nail good connections 99% of the time. The worst thing we've had to do is re-polish some ends. As for running cable in general, I couldn't tell you how many miles of cable I've run in my life and I always try to make sure there is more than enough because a repeat sucks.
 
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