OFS Salutes the International Day of Photonics

The International Day of Photonics is held every two years to recognize and promote the role of photonics in our world. On this day (October 21 in 2016), organizations work to raise awareness about photonics and the important role that it plays in our lives.

In fact, photonics is a key enabling technology for a wide range of products that surround us. LED lighting, photovoltaic solar energy, photonics integrated circuits, optical components, lasers, sensors, imaging, displays, projectors and optical fiber are only a few of today’s technologies that incorporate photonics.

At OFS, we design, manufacture and provide optical fiber, fiber optic cable, connectivity and fiber-to-the-subscriber (FTTx) products. Our solutions cover a broad range of applications including telecommunications, medicine, industrial automation, sensing, government, aerospace and defense.

To learn more about the International Day of Photonics and photonics technologies, please visit HERE.

The Standards They Are A-Changin’

Recent activity in the TIA TR-42 Engineering Committee produced multiple standards affecting the specification, design, installation and management of fiber optic cabling components and systems.

To help providers understand these changing standards, Product Manager John Kamino will take center stage in a webinar sponsored by Cabling Installation and Maintenance on October 27, 2016. During this session, John will discuss topics including the ANSI/TIA-492AAAE Standard for Wideband Multimode Fiber and revisions in the TIA-942-B standard for Data Center Cabling.

To learn more and register for this webinar, please visit HERE.

New Fiber Optic Cable Helps to Speed Deployment with Direct Outdoor-to-Indoor Routing

OFS will launch the newest addition to its growing Premises Cable product line at the BICSI Fall Conference in San Antonio next week.

Specifically designed to offer high-fiber density and speed of deployment in the backbone of Data Center and Central Office networks, the new AccuRiser™ Indoor/Outdoor Ribbon Cable allows cables to be terminated only as needed.  This capability helps to eliminate the costly splicing of OSP cables at the building entrance, while also freeing up limited space and helping to save on time, an essential factor to efficient installation.

To see and learn more about the AccuRiser Indoor/Outdoor Ribbon Cable, visit OFS booth # 333 at the BICSI Fall Conference in San Antonio, September 11-15. The following links offer access to the product data sheet and white paper on this new cable.

Specialty Optical Fiber Coatings: Weathering the “Storm”

Different applications and optical fiber types present varying requirements for fiber coatings. When specialty optical fibers are used in demanding conditions, the fibers require coatings that are sustainable when subjected to harsh circumstances.

In fact, the successful deployment of fiber in these environments can often depend far more on the fiber’s protective external coating rather than its internal optical design. Fibers may be under attack from high and low temperature ranges, excessive humidity, high pressure, aggressive chemicals, mechanical interactions or any combination of these elements.

OFS has the ability to package your optical fiber-based solution with a variety of coatings for your critical application requirements as an example a recent OFS white paper in NASA Tech Briefs evaluates the stability of commercially available and in-house formulated, acrylate-based coatings to help determine the optimum coating for a range of conditions.

Changing the Rules of Light

Physicists have discovered a totally new light form that could change our fundamental understanding of the nature of light and also lead to faster and more secure fiber optic communication.

Researchers often measure a light beam through its angular momentum (a constant quantity that measures how much that light is rotating or spinning). Until now, they believed that, for all forms of light, the angular momentum would be a whole number multiple of Planck’s constant (a physical constant that sets the scale of quantum effects).

However, Irish scientists at Trinity College Dublin and the CRANN Institute demonstrated that a new light form exists where the angular momentum is only half of its typical value. While this difference seems small, it is profound: this fundamental property of light, which physicists always believed was fixed, can be changed. The researchers expect this discovery to shake up scientists’ understanding of light and also have real impact on the study of light waves in areas such as fiber optic communications.

To learn more, click here.

Meeting the Data Center Demand for Increased Bandwidth

Today’s data centers are increasingly using 40 and 100 Gb/s Ethernet speeds. Work is also underway to develop 400 Gb/s Ethernet and 256 Gb/s Fiber Channel standards for next-generation networks. How are the optical fiber and structured cabling industries responding to this growth in demand for bandwidth?

To learn more, mark your calendar to hear OFS’ John Kamino (BICSI RCDD) Senior Manager – Multimode Fiber Product Management cover this and other topics during his “Next-Generation Multimode Fiber” presentation at the BICSI Winter Conference in Orlando on Tuesday, February 2, 9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m.  For more information on this topic, please go HERE.

Advanced Fiber Optic Technologies for Next-Generation Networking

If you missed the recent webcast on “Advanced Fiber Optic Technologies for Next-Generation Networking,” you’re in luck.  This webinar produced by Cabling Installation & Maintenance, is still available for viewing.

The seminar examines several of the latest developments in fiber optic cabling infrastructure and also places specific emphasis on how these advancements position optical fiber as a medium prepared for the next generation of networking.  To access the webcast, please go HERE.

Meeting the Need for Speed

Bandwidth demand continues to grow unabated and is predicted to increase at a compound annual rate of nearly 25 percent over the next five years.  The use of virtualization in servers has driven intra-data center traffic to new levels, while the rapid deployment of cloud computing applications is creating demand for higher-speed enterprise networks.

In a new article in BICSI’s ICT Today, John Kamino and Roman Shubochkin of OFS discuss how the optical fiber and cabling industry is supporting this need for higher network speeds by developing a new, next-generation multimode fiber – wideband multimode fiber.

Managing Change in Data Center Cabling and Systems

From network cabling to supporting infrastructure, every system in a data center must deliver solid, consistent performance.  However, because data centers are subject to frequent reconfiguration, they must also be adaptable to change.

A recent webcase seminar from Cabling Installation & Maintenance provides an inside look at technologies that can help data centers to meet the challenge of remaining both dependable and flexible.

 

A Miniature Turnaround for Distributed Temperature Sensing

Fiber optic distributed temperature sensing systems (DTS) are valuable tools used for a broad range of applications, including the monitoring of hydrologic systems and power cables, and the detection of pipeline leaks. In many fiber optic DTS systems, a dual-ended configuration can correct the temperature measurement error associated with wavelength dependent loss (WDL) of the optical fiber. This design can also provide a more accurate temperature measurement when compared with a single-ended fiber system.

Xiaoguang Sun, David T. Burgess, Kyle Bedard, Jie Li and Mike Hines of OFS recently presented a white paper on this subject at the 2015 SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing Conference. This paper focuses on their research findings when a miniature-turnaround device built with a short section of a graded index (GI) fiber is used. To read more, please go HERE.