Indoor optical cables have a common weakness: attenuation. Any accidental twisting or bending of the fiber optic cable in the house can cause attenuation, which can lead to signal loss, thereby damaging the application.
To address this issue, bend-insensitive fibers are designed to result in lower optical power loss under bending conditions. This way, cable bends do not become an obstacle for indoor cable installations.
What is Bend Insensitive Fiber?
Bend-insensitive fibers can transmit light with minimal loss even when bent beyond the bend radius. In bend-insensitive fibers, optical trenches are built around the core with a lower-index material so that lost light can be reflected back, minimizing data loss.
At the same time, other factors, such as core diameter, wavelength, single-mode or multi-mode, etc. are also optimized to minimize losses caused by excessive fiber bending during installation or maintenance.
Advantages of Bend Insensitive Fiber
It can avoid indoor cable installation errors (distribution frames, racks, cable inlets and outlets, etc.) caused by excessive bending of indoor cables.
Bend insensitive cables are suitable for indoor cable installations as they can now be used on building walls, columns, ceilings, pipes and other uneven surfaces.
Higher bandwidth applications can be safely deployed using bend-insensitive fibers because accidental over-bending of the fiber will not cause much performance degradation.
bend insensitive fiber
Bend-insensitive fibers also exhibit great elasticity when the fibers are fixed to surfaces by clamping, knotting, or suturing.
Bend-insensitive fiber can be spliced like ordinary fiber optic cable, and in most cases, ordinary fiber optic connectors and accessories are compatible with bend-insensitive fiber.
Why choose bend-insensitive fiber for fiber-to-the-home?
With the ever-increasing demand for higher bandwidth, copper cables are reaching their limits. Fiber-to-the-home networks are expected to replace copper networks with bend-sensitive optical fibers. Bend-insensitive indoor cables have less attenuation than traditional cables, which will make cable installation and maintenance more efficient.
In fiber-to-the-home networks, the fibers need to be insensitive to bends so that they can be deployed more easily indoors, such as at sloping points along a wall in a room. Another benefit we can gain from bend-insensitive indoor cables is space savings.
This is also the development trend of the future optical fiber network, which is smaller, denser and more efficient. There are many companies like ours that offer bend-insensitive fibers that comply with the ITU-T G657 standard.
In summary
Bend-insensitive fibers maintain low power loss under bending conditions. This kind of indoor optical cable is very necessary for the application of optical fiber in the home access network. Our bend insensitive patch cords are suitable for OM2, OM3 and OM4 multimode and OS2 singlemode networks.
