OTDRs and Finding Fiber Faults: Do you Need Engineers with OTDR Expertise?

No OTDR Experience Needed

iSFC® Transceivers incorporate the functionality required to deploy fast, distributed and pervasive fiber optic link monitoring with near 100% detection efficiency.  These transceivers do not require specialty equipment or specially trained operators, but may reside in standard Host Switches/Routers which may be managed through industry standard SNMP systems, offering many benefits over legacy Remote Fiber Testing Systems (RFTS).

[button align=”left” link=”https://ozc.vmdevsite.com/sfc/otdrsfc/” color=”red” textColor=”#FFFFFF”]More info on iSFC transceivers with built-in OTDR >>[/button]

Automatic Link Birth Certificate

iSFC Transceivers allow the automatic recording of a Birth Certificate at the time of Link installation, so every “install” has a working state OTDR reading (which can be just as important as the RFC2544 Birth Certificate).  During a Link “down” event, iSFC Transceivers can quickly and categorically allow the CSP (Communications Services Provider) to discern between an optical fiber break or a problem with the equipment at the Customer Premises (CPE).  After a fiber break event, the iSFC Transceiver helps the CSP to more quickly dispatch the right team, for the right problem, reducing  Operational Expense (OpEx) by avoiding the dispatch of the “wrong” technical repair team, which cannot fix the problem, and thereby reduce MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Repair).

Distributed Physical Layer Optical Fiber Monitoring

With built-in Micro-OTDR, iSFC® Transceivers residing in network switches/routers distribute physical layer optical fiber monitoring throughout a network; facilitate mapping (see video >>) for easily interpreted comprehensive network views and offer new approaches to security, disaster recovery, installation and maintenance, rapidly locating multiple fiber breaks in natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes).  They also detect  and counter theft, vandalism and other physical intrusions.  For installation and maintenance, iSFC transceivers help guide the CSP to dispatch only the necessary technical resources, reducing mean-time-to-deployment and/or mean-time-to repair.

What iSFC Transceivers Do for the CSP and OEM

CSPs stand to benefit in the above ways with their networking equipment already in the field (only requiring minor firmware upgrade to read the iSFC transceivers data).  A significant cost advantage may be gained over specialty RFTS and network monitoring equipment, since the iSFC® transceivers do all “the work”, are fast to deploy and easy to demonstrate. iSFC transceivers offer significant potential  competitive  advantage  for  those  CSPs and network switch/router OEMs who become iSFC “early adopters.”