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Looking to avoid major outages? Our Fiber Guardian is helping leading telcos do just that.

FG-750 fiber monitoring solution successfully deployed in Singapore

The telecom industry is highly competitive at the best of times. And operators know that quality of service and continuous network availability are crucial to their success. To up its game, our customer, one of the leading telcos in Singapore, initially deployed two FG‑750 Fiber Guardians to monitor part of its network, and roughly drew some fiber routes in the Fiber Test Insight (FTI) application without including any adjustments, such as slack loops, splices, or termination points. Although only one of the fibers in the customer’s 200‑fiber cable was being monitored, Fiber Guardian was still able to detect a problem. What’s more, Fiber Guardian had only been installed a few months when it detected a 0.34 dB fiber degradation, thanks to its learning phase and adaptive thresholds. Here’s what happened:

Incident timeline

  1. 10:50 a.m.: An alarm sounds, signaling a 0.34 dB fiber degradation at 29.254 km.
  2. 10:59 a.m.: The alarm shows that the loss is now critical at 1.2 dB.
  3. Our customer immediately dispatches a maintenance truck to the location.
  4. Upon arrival, the maintenance crew notices that the conduits housing their cables have been dug out and bent. The contractors had not properly supported the conduits and the kink was damaging the 200-fiber cable inside.
  • Even without optical-geographical adjustments, FTI reported a near-exact fault location (99% accuracy). Of course, accuracy can be improved by adjusting various settings according to known events along the fiber route (connectors, splices, manholes, etc.).

So, how does it work?

Fiber Guardian is a “system in a box” that uses leading EXFO OTDR technology to accurately detect and locate fiber degradations and instantly send detailed information (type, distance and location of fault) to network managers or network operations centers.

As soon as a degradation is detected, the FG-750 transmits the optical distance to your GIS system or one of our most popular tools—Fiber Test Insight (FTI), which automatically maps the fiber fault and sends an alert with a Google Maps hyperlink pinpointing the fault. Technicians or maintenance crews can simply look up the fault with Google on their smartphones, then drive to point of failure—FTI can be used with one or multiple Fiber Guardian units.

What our customers are saying:

“The degradation alarm helped us avoid a major outage. That day, we instructed the construction site PM to better support our suspended conduit to prevent any further problems with our fiber cable. When my colleague and I returned to the exchange to assess the damage, we ascertained that everything was back to normal and the rest of the fibers were intact,” says the Singapore telco. “We plan to deploy additional units soon to monitor more core links in our network.”

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