Clearfield has launched the ClearPass™ Dust Cap, a new integrated solution that helps service providers ensure the fiber end face has a clean, dust-free connection surface.
The company claims it can achieve a 92% cleaning effectiveness rate when used on a Clearfield terminated product. ClearPass Dust Cap adds to the Clearfield Labor Lite solution set, delivering an integrated cleaning tool that will improve network turnup, reliability, and first pass yield–a critical performance indicator maintained by fiber providers.
When left unchecked, minute particles of dust can cause permanent damage to networks, blocking fiber transmission signals, pockmarking end faces, and causing reflection. These issues often result in additional deployment costs and service disruption.
Fiber engineers cite the lack of a clean end face as a critical factor impacting fiber broadband network deployment success. Dust and dirt are everywhere, given the realities of deploying equipment throughout the outside plant. A ready-to-use solution to create a smooth, clean connection is critical to automatically getting fiber broadband services up and working correctly.
Kevin Morgan, CMO for Clearfield, said that problems arise when connecting fiber jumpers and fiber assemblies if there’s a presence of dust or other debris.
“Over 90 percent of the time, the problems in the network are with dirty interfaces or lack of training, which is related to the labor shortage we have today,” he said. “You have so many people trying to enter this market, and they are not equipped with the necessary tools.”
He added, “This idea enables an easy-to-use method that can help solve the problem of the dirty end faces.”
Addressing uncontrolled environments
A big issue that the ClearPass Dust Cap can address is the varying areas that a service provider installing fiber broadband will find.
“When you think where these deployments are happening, they are in uncontrolled environments at the homes where there’s much dust,” Morgan said. “I have even seen trained technicians leave their interfaces and ends of fibers lying on the ground.”
ClearPass Dust Cap is available for all SC, FC, and ST connectors with 2.5mm ferrules and is Clearfield’s latest innovation in fiber connector cleaning technology, purpose-built to streamline its customers’ ability to move quickly through all stages of network deployment from planning to provisioning to service activation.
The ClearPass Dust Cap simplified cleaning method began shipping in on all applicable Clearfield jumpers at no additional cost to the customer.
“ClearPass Dust Cap does not include a price increase,” Morgan said. “It’s just a value add hopefully to help pull through other products, and I think it’s something that’s needed in the industry to help it get over rolling out fiber quickly and reliably that uses modern techniques.” A fiber installer can use the ClearPass Dust Cap in all areas of the network, including jumpers in the Central Office, the neighborhood cross-connect cabinet, and the end of the drop cables.
“There’s several places where it would appear,” Morgan said.
Ease of use
With its main customer target being community-based fiber providers, Clearfield has designed the new ClearPass Dust Cap to be easy to use.
The vendor currently has 1,000 community broadband customers, a base that continues to grow.
One of the issues is that the community often assigns build-out work to several contractors, all of whom have different experience levels.
“Many communities get contractors to put in their networks and their logo badge to connect the homes, which have varying degrees of training, ” Morgan said.
In one case, Clearfield trained a contractor, and then the provider decided to change to another one that needed to be trained. “This creates a difficulty for us to have continuity in that process,” Morgan said. “But when you make a simple product like this, it obviates the need.”
Clearfield focuses on two goals with its product lines: make them craft-friendly and use less skilled labor where possible, make things faster to deploy and reduce permitting and right-of-way requirements in the network. Morgan said, “These elements are part of our DNA.”
Fiber technicians are under pressure to meet strict installation timelines—a factor that can lead to potential mistakes.
“Many times, the technicians are on a clock,” Morgan said. “They are given 90 minutes to get home connected. If they get a light and the ONTs come on, they leave the premises.”
Just because a technician sees the ONT becomes active does not mean it is within the specifications or makes it durable. “This is because often customers are subscribing to a lower data rate than the technology can provide, like 100 or 200 Mbps,” Morgan said. “When they go 1 Gbps, they can’t quite get there.”
He added that a provider can “change out the ONT to support 10G PON, but if the technician had not installed it correctly, they would be out of specification.”
