Hello everyone!
Today, I continue to write about optical cables. Now, the topic is loose tube cables.
In the first article about this topic, I shortly explained the construction of these cables (PE jacket, aramid fibers – Kevlar, fiberglass rode, PVC tubes with gel and fibers with buffer coating). The loose tube cables can be divided:
microcables,
ribbon cables,
armored cables,
high fiber count cables,
aerial cables (ADSS, Fig8, OPGW, etc).
In this article, I will explain ribbon and high fiber count cables.
Ribbon cables
Ribbon cables are used in situations where a large number of fibers is required. These cables have a small diameter, the optical fibers are arranged in rows, one on top of the other, and one strip is usually about 12 fibers. This is the cable with the highest density. Ribbon optical cable with a capacity of 144 fibers has a fiber diameter of about 6 mm, and with a jacket is about 13 mm. The next figure shows ribbon cables. We can see all elements of this cable – jacket, aramid yarn, acrylic coating or buffer and optical fibers).
Figure 1. Ribbon cable
Their construction contains a gel to prevent the penetration of water and moisture. Ribbon cables do not splice like standard fiber optic cables - fiber by fiber. These cables are spliced by 12 fibers at a time. They usually use MPO or MTP optical connectors that are for 12 or 24 fibers. These cables are very commonly seen in LANs and data centers or headends.
High fiber count cables
These are very high density packing cables. They use bend-insensitive fibers, whose fiber diameter is less than 200 μm. They are similar to microcables, but with an even greater number of optical fibers - I'm talking about cables with a capacity of 1728, 3456 or 6912 fibers. They are used for the realization of shorter optical routes. The most common application is in data centers and for the metropolitan network.
In the following figure, we can see these types of optical cables. Two examples of high-capacity optical cables can be seen, and we can see their diameter. Really amazing.
Figure 2. High fiber count cables
This is the end of this article. I will continue to write about this theme in the next article >> Optical cables (4): Loose tube cables.
Thank you!
