APRIL 24, 2009 -- Draka Communications-Americas (search Lightwave for Draka) announces a new family of fiber cables designed and manufactured to provide forgiveness, speed, and low connector insertion loss during installation. The manufacturer says ezInterconnect cables with BendBright-XS fiber inside eliminate the historical barriers encountered while routing fiber cables into and through an apartment, condo, high-rise building, or multitenant business center.
Dean Yamasaki, applications manager at Draka Communications-Americas, says the company looked for a way to provide more value to installers after seeing "the frequent number of 90-degree bends and pathway obstacles, plus we heard the contractor reinforce the need for a fiber cable that can tolerate tie wraps and staples." He says the result of the prototype phase was "a fiber cable that has a minimum bend radius of only 7.5 mm and handles like copper in the customer premise."
Draka's new MDU product line features:
- indoor or indoor-outdoor flame ratings
- with or without connectors
- Standard connectors or HLC (hardened lens contact)
- ScratchGuard connector technology
- 2.9-mm OD and 4.8-mm OD versions
The G.657.A BendBright bend-insensitive fiber offers a 10x bend tolerance improvement over standard singlemode fiber. The second-generation G.657.B bend-insensitive fiber, BendBright-XS, offers a 100x bend-tolerance improvement and is targeted for challenging FTTH applications. Draka recently released a variation of BendBright-XS, BendBright-Elite, that offers high bending performance at any bend radius for specialty applications such as optical components and military/aerospace markets.