Cost Reduction Technologies of Optical Drop Cable and Indoor Cable

1.Introduction

Fiber to the home (Ftth) is one of the latestinformation infrastructures and has attracted the interest of telecom carries throughout the word (1) -(4).An urgent concern in terms of realizing the FTTH network is to distribute the optical fiber efficiently and economically.This is especially so in dropping and internal wiring section for a customer's house, where low cost and speedy fiber constructing technologies are strongly required.This is because the facilities in this section cannot be shared but must be individually installed for each customer.

This paper presents technologies for cables and associated hardware that have just been developed in order to reduce costs for dropping and internal wiring to a client's hours.By using these technologies, hardware and construction costs in dropping and internal wiring section for a customer's house,are simultaneously reduced and,as a result,we believe the Ftth Drop Cable will become practical

2.Configuration of dropping and internal wiring for customer's house

Figure 1 shows a typical configuration of the dropping and internal wiring for a customer's house.It has been recently proposed that a distribution method based on the integrated access point is effective for improving facility utilization.This distribution method requires several kinds of cable and associated hardware.These include:Cluster-type optical drop cable; Drop Cable; Indoor Cable; Accsss point the Closure; Drop point closure; Cabinnet on the outside walls of customer's houses; Cabinet inside the customer; s houses.We describe the structure and performance of the above cables, closures and cabinet.Moreover, we report on the design of staples for fixing the cable.

3.Technologies of cable and associated hardware

Our key design concept is to use 0.2mm diameter mono -coated fiber in dropping and internal wiring section for a customer's house.This design can provide small,lightweight cable which means we can reduce the cost o f both the cable itself and it's installation.In this section, we describe the structure and features of newly developed cables and associated hardware in detail.

3.1 Cable

Figure 2 shows the structure of our new drop cable and cluster-type drop cable.The drop cable combines the self -supporting wire section with the fiber insertion section,help to reduce the manufacturing process.At the same time, cable is provided with notch to improve the separability of these two sections during fixing operations on a telephone pole, and the removability of optical fiber during connection work.In general,indoor cable is deployed through a pipe inside a wall.Cable for indoor applications includes the following:Simplex Fiber Optic Cables; heavy--light-and Plenum-duty cable; breakout cables; ribbon cables, multiplier cables and Duplex Fiber Optic Cable, measurements of the transmission and mechanical properties of this cable showed them to be stable with little loss.In addition, we confirmed that there no problems with the workability of the cable, the removability of the optical fibers.